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The Overdub Tampering Committee

Scam or not, the Overdub Tampering Committee could signal the resurgence of the mashup.

Matt Rosoff
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.
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Matt Rosoff

Last week, a group calling itself the Overdub Tampering Committee posted an online manifesto in which its anonymous members claim to have downloaded songs from various sources (Limewire, OiNK, The Pirate Bay, and so on), overdubbed extra parts, then re-uploaded them. The group claims that if you're a frequent downloader of grey-market music from these types of sites, you've probably got one of their messed-up mashups on your hard drive.

Overdub Tampering Committee
Overdub Tampering Committee

Their tactics remind me of guerilla art from the likes of RTmark and Banksy, with one exception: they offer no proof of what they've done, leading some to suspect an elaborate hoax.

Real or not, imagine if this type of remixing becomes a mainstream activity, with everybody posting their personal dubs to their blogs or social-networking home pages. Perhaps some enterprising artists will begin to sell track-separated versions of their work, a sort of raw material alongside their finished product.