Modern Day Music Theft -
I was browsing Nekoweb as usual and came across a really interesting site. https://oyaswmi.net/. It actually originally came to my attention from TM asking a quesiton in the Discord, but I only got to see the landing page because the full site wouldn't load at the time.
The background song on https://oyaswmi.net/ is a certain mood. I like it. I can't really describe it. I wanted to find the original song online so I could stream it (not leave oyaswmi on in the background). I went through the files of the website and found the audio file. It was only labelled as "lain_bgm.mp3". This gave me one lead. Lain.
There's a few mentions of Lain on https://oyaswmi.net/, so taking the filename into account, I figured it had to be a song from there. I couldn't really find anything online. Searching "Serial Experiments Lain BGM" gave me two songs. Neither of which were the song from oyaswmi's page. I asked the Nekoweb Discord and got a reply. I was sent a song titled, 寂しん坊 by an artist named no words. Lo and behold, its the same song from oyaswmi's page! Except.. it's not.
I decided to Shazam the song directly from oyaswmi's page just to see if it was really that easy to find. I got 寂しん坊 back almost immediately. This has to be the song then, right?
This version has percussion in it. I figured it was maybe a later part of the song where percussion slowly comes in. This was it, I found the song, so we're all good now? No. I noticed something weird. I found 寂しん坊 on Apple Music and it was released in 2023. There is definitely something off about that. Serial Experiments Lain came out in 1999. I don't know much about the series, nor have I seen it, but I knew that the real song couldn't have been released by a guy in 2023..
Was this was another Omae Wa Mou situtation? #
If you rememeber a few years ago, there was a track that exploded online. It was called Omae Wa Mou by Deadman. Immediately, I knew this song wasn't made by Deadman. I was heavily into osu! at the time and had Tiny Little Adiantum by Shibayan Records in my library. Deadman only added some terrible trap drums and some anime voice clips overtop. This awful "original" got so popular that Deadman was able to content claim the ORIGINAL version of the song uploaded to YouTube BY SHIBAYAN RECORDS.
This was one of the first times I saw such blatant theft of music. It was unbelievable. All you had to do was add a default FL Studio drum track to a song, have it blow up on TikTok, and there you go, the whole world believed it to be yours. After some light was brought upon this situation, Shibayan Records eventually got full claims of their song back. Deadman also had to provide credits to Shybayan Records on his version.
The issue is that the damage is still done. People still believe that Tiny Little Adiantum is made by Deadman. I thought this would be one of the last times I saw something like this happen again, but I was wrong.
The real song #
I thought about the Deadman situation and decided to go searching for this Lain song before I gave up. It didn't take me much more searching to find it. It was the last track in a video titled "Serial Experiments Lain Ambient Tracks". I'm not sure why I didn't originally click on this one as it is the third video result for "lain bgm" in Google.
The real song is titled 一人ぼっち1b. The video I have linked here was uploaded in 2010. You don't need to do the math. There is no possible way that the version by no name is the original.
It makes me sad that popular music search tools like Shazam don't actually help you find original songs. It will point to some blatant theft and call it good. If a user doesn't know any better, they transform songs like 寂しん坊 into the new original when in fact the real original is from decades ago.
Adding drums over a niche and obscure song doesn't give you the right to call it your own. Slowing down a song with reverb doesn't make it your own. I hate how easily people get away with this.
Nobody got to become a good musician or artist overnight. Making a good song isn't just copy pasting others' work and slightly modifying it. Practice and you can make cool things.