Jennifer, Alison, Phillipa, Sue, Deborah, Annabel, too. The Beautiful South might have forgotten your names, but Spotify hasn’t – it’s got a personalised happy birthday song for you.
Yes, if you’ve got a birthday in the family but haven’t got enough people to kickstart a rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, Spotify can help you out. More importantly, if you’ve got a gullible little person in the house and want to make them feel special on their big day, you can convince them you’ve bought a special birthday song just for them.
In case you’re thinking, “Doesn’t some big company own the copyright to Happy Birthday?”, the answer is “not anymore”. Warner/Chapell Music earned millions of dollars from the copyright during the 20th century, but a 2015 ruling declared that the song was now in the public domain.
That means ‘artists’ – by which I mean someone with a Casio keyboard and a microphone – can now earn a living by recording ‘personalised’ Happy Birthday songs. It’s dead easy when you think about it – record one version of Happy Birthday, splice in a different name every time and sit back and count the fraction of the penny you get for every play.
How to find a personalised Happy Birthday song
Finding these songs in Spotify couldn’t be much easier. Go to the search facility, type “Happy Birthday Nathan” or whatever the Birthday Boy/Girl’s name is, and you’ll almost certainly get a matching result.
We’ve tested it with dozens of different names, and there are only a few that don’t register a hit. Such as…
And..
We understand those names have rather nosedived in popularity in recent years, anyway…
(Main picture credit: gomagoti/Flickr)
Add Comment