Blatantly Stolen?

Recently, there is a big controversy about a remix song on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. There is a Chinese artist called Da Zhang Wei, who is known for remixing songs and transforming old songs into remix versions or pop versions. He was invited to a show called “The Remix”, which is a music based entertainment show for artists to make remix version of the songs they chose and perform them to the audiences and celebrity judges. From the title of the show, you can tell that the songs being performed by the artists are obviously not original. When you’re remixing something, you are certainly taking previous work done by other people then adding your own creativity into it. However, some people don’t buy the whole “remixing is not cheating” thing and criticize Da Zhang Wei for taking parts of the song from Zedd’s Candyman. Da Zhang Wei wrote a post on his public page saying that he did borrowed the song from Zedd out of respect because the rhythm fits well with the song, and this should not be considered cheating because he’s only doing it for a remix show rather than publishing this song for making money on every download. The interesting thing is that, as a remix artist himself, Zedd didn’t think of this in the same way. On Twitter, he responded to this problem, saying that Da Zhang Wei is blatantly stealing his work.