Former NE Volume Music Bar Battle of the Band winners, White Noise., have been forced to change their name. Lee Allcock caught up with frontman, Cameron Young, to find out why.
Tell me a bit about the name change and how that came about…
The name change came about after we announced our CDs. An artist sharing a similar name commented on our post saying something along the lines of “This is my trademark. Change your name now before I take your music down.” We then, of course, privately messaged the fella to discuss this and he showed his trademark, which is only valid in the US, so we shut him down. We then explained how there would ultimately be no crossover and the format our name was laid out in a different format, meaning it should have protected us. We followed this by blocking him as he began to harass us.
Tell me a bit about the copyright infringement and what was said…
So the way the trademark infringement works is a trademark is the title of your brand/ company, for example, Coca-Cola, and in buying the trademark, you solidify ownership of that variation of the word, stopping others from using it. There are National trademarks and universal trademarks. The accuser mentioned owns a US trademark, however, as you know, we aren’t based in America. But due to Apple being an American company, they decided to take the American side of the law and give us an ultimatum of five days to change our name or have our work taken down.
It must have been a very stressful time…
It’s a big shame the whole experience came about, to be honest, and a bit confusing. We’ve spent the past six years with the title White Noise., creating a name and a brand even down to releasing physical copies and merch with that title only for it to all get wiped clean thanks to the obsession of one person in America of claiming a common phrase – even down to claiming that he plans to take down all the white noise meditation artists on Spotify. Regardless of our opinions, his ownership of a trademark of “white noise” has left us no choice but to change our entire history as a band.
Why the name End Credits?
We brainstormed so many different names. We were almost going insane as anyone who knows us knows that the four of us couldn’t pick what food to eat together so to come up with a new name was definitely a tedious task. However, I remember scrolling through something I was reading that said “night at the movies” and the name just came to mind and by some surprise, we all agreed upon it.
How do you plan to keep the momentum going now that you’ve had to change your name?
As of now, our main focus is to just fix any issues we’ve had (there’s been quite a few) with the new streaming platform accounts and just rebuild our following as we’ve lost a lot of our support on those. We were ready to go with our next lot of releases of music as we’ve been making a “B-Sides & Demos” release, followed by our first single of our phase 2 as the band entitled ‘Outsiders’. However, we’ve had to further delay until we rebuild some of that following. Any support would be appreciated on our journey back to where we once were. As hard as it’s been, we do have hope and we know that our fans will support us regardless of the situation.
You can now follow White Noise, sorry, End Credits, on social media at /endcreditsuk.
