I have never talked about the band Muse on my channel and rather than talk about an albums or
the making of a songs, for the first story on the band, someone had requested a much different story
through my request form.. Back in 2003 it came out that Muse had sued coffee maker NESCAFE’s
and their parent company Nestle. Let’s explore what happened.
Muse rose to prominence in the early 2000’s. and throughout their career their lyrics have
really evolved throughout their career first discussing themes of alienation and relationships
before graduating to the dark side of technology, war and government control.
In 2003 Nescafe was running tv advertisements that used Muse’s cover of the song Feeling Good.
The song is synonymous with Nina Simone even though she didn’t write it.
The song was written by English composers Lee Briscus
and Anthony Newley for the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint - the smell of the crowd. It
would later be covered and become synonymous with Jazz and soul singer Nina Simone one year later.
According to the website drowned in sound apparently the publishing was owned by
Nina Simone’s estate. Feeling Good would be covered by numerous artists over the years
and Muse would release a cover of the song on their 2001 album Origin of Symmetry.
Their cover was considered by the readers of NME magazine to be the greatest cover of all time
beating out Hurt By Johnny Cash and the Beatles Twist and Shout. The song was released as double
a side single along with Hyper Music & would peak at number 24 in the UK and go gold.
It would turn out that coffe company Nescafe would use Muse’s cover of the
song in their 2003 advertisement without the band’s permission. Muse would put out a
statement on their website that read at the time "Muse are very surprised to see their version of
the song 'Feeling Good' appearing in a recent Nescafe TV advertisement. Especially as Muse
specifically said no when Nescafe requested the recording. Muse`s management are on the case"
they'd say. Personally, I always assumed that to use a song you only need permission of the person
who owns the publishing, so if another artist covered it you wouldn't need their permission.
It turned out that Nestle originally asked Muse to use their version which they said no to.
They then increased the money they offered to license the song and the band still said
no as did the record label. One report i came across said the band didn’t want their music
being used to sell coffee while another report claims the band declined the offer because of
and i quote “baby starving connotations." Nescafe didn’t stop there as they went to
the owner of the song’s publishing which was Nina Simone and got her permission to use the
song hence why they used Muse’s version. Regarding the "baby starving connotations" Nestle has been
labelled as one of the most unethical companies in the world. One of the biggest scandals the
company was involved with dated back to the 70’s where Nestle got mothers many of whom lived in
squalor in the developing world hooked on baby formula instead of breast milk. Nestle went as
far as to lobby hospitals to push formula as well. The end result was that 1.5 million children died
and many grew up manlourished. The allegations led to hearings in the Senate and the World
Health Organization, who created a new set of marketing rules. Another big scandal involving
the company was their alleged use of slave labor to create their chocolate products.
These and several other scandals would result in people boycotting the company.
Getting back to the story with Muse. They would end up suing Nestle over unauthorized use of the
cover of Felling Good and would be awarded 500,000 pounds. It was reported that they
donated all of the money to charity. Most of the money would be donated to Oxfam & Nescafe
would end up using Nina Simone’s cover of the song after their dust up with Muse.
NME would interview Muse frontman matthew bellamy in 2003 who discussed the controversy saying
"They asked us to do the advert and we said "no". And it just turned up on TV. We said,
"This is ridiculous, can you take it off?" They did and then replaced it with some bloody crappy
version of the song! We got some money but we're going to give it to charity. A large
percentage of that will go to someone like Oxfam (who run the Make Trade Fair campaign
helping independent coffee producers amongst others), and then the rest to some local
charities near where we're from in Devon." The interviewer would ask Bellamy whether
the band would ever license their music to sell products to which he responded
"You have to be careful, I'm not necessarily against adverts, as long as it's something we
agree with, be it the company or the product that we would ourselves use. A nice, decent,
fast car wouldn't be bad" he'd laugh. Years after the controversy,
the song would be heavily licensed by hollywood in both films and television as well as appearing
in the video game The Saboteur. That does it for today's video guys. Thanks for watching. Be sure