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How did Windows 95 get permission to put the Weezer video Buddy Holly on the CD?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260210-00/?p=112052
68•ingve•3h ago

Comments

RegnisGnaw•3h ago
Licensing?
ssl-3•1h ago
I read the whole thing (all several paragraphs of it) and the answer is, indeed: Licensing.

It's approximately the least-interesting article I've read this year.

kyleee•1h ago
Is there any way to make this submission even less interesting? Perhaps we can speculate about parts being written by AI. Did you see any em dashes?
giancarlostoro•1h ago
It's just a journal style entry, its not bad that its boring, but its so bland. It will become LLM fodder I'm sure.
bigfishrunning•50m ago
We all will. Ashes to ashes.
bigstrat2003•1h ago
I found it somewhat interesting that they had to track down all the actors from Happy Days. You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.

But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.

dylan604•1h ago
> You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.

That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.

netsharc•1h ago
Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).

This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!

llm_nerd•1h ago
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.

Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.

1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.

kej•55m ago
... It's a father trying to protect his son from the world's dangers. Not every picture of two men is sexual.
llm_nerd•48m ago
... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal.

"Not every picture of two men is sexual."

Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"

But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"

add-sub-mul-div•35m ago
In this vastly unlikely passive aggressive hypothetical scenario, you're imagining that a random person who might see your screen would be as triggered by the image as you were. Most people had figured out by then that two men together are no more offensive or evil than a man and a woman.
kej•22m ago
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
JCattheATM•44m ago
> Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.

Apple is an incredibly obnoxious company, obnoxious behavior should be expected.

Also, 'llm_nerd' for a username, really?

whizzter•1h ago
Because it auto-played when you didn't want to.

If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.

So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.

Brian_K_White•1h ago
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.

And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.

You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.

pstuart•47m ago
And somebody probably got a fat bonus for that shovelware.
wk_end•1h ago
The perception was: my iTunes library is mine, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.

Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!

chungy•38m ago
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
agumonkey•30m ago
Totally. Windows CD was a gift box to explore, nothing in it was intrusive.
Hatrix•1h ago
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
spatulon•42m ago
Apple also put the music video for The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies on the Mac OS 8 CD.
digiown•41m ago
Imagine that's the worst that happens to "your" library. Good times. We really need to bring the idea of ownership back.

https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...

https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...

wil421•38m ago
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
thomassmith65•21m ago
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
TacticalCoder•20m ago
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal

You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?

wojciii•1h ago
I must confess that these kind of corporate storie make me throw up in my mouth. (Yes, I have karma to burn, hit me)
boca_honey•43m ago
I liked this one because that video on that CD was a big part of my childhood.

But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.

1123581321•1h ago
Always enjoy Raymond Chen's musings.

My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)

We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.

JCattheATM•42m ago
> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.

What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.

ploxiln•35m ago
High school ... 20+ years ago probably
JCattheATM•28m ago
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
panzagl•32m ago
Probably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.
JCattheATM•28m ago
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
bananaflag•26m ago
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.

This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.

My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.

It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.

Philadelphia•1h ago
Apple put Barenaked Ladies’ The Old Apartment video on the Mac OS 8 CD as a QuickTime demo
nicholashead•58m ago
This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
everfrustrated•5m ago
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.

Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)

sequin•49m ago
The Weezer video was quirky, funny, creative, catchy and appealing to multiple generations. A stroke of genius by Microsoft.
abtinf•44m ago
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
bluedino•42m ago
We used to see who had the most powerful PC by seeing how many videos we could play at once. Long with Robroy and whatever other video was on there.
zdw•31m ago
It's well known that Bill Gates's favorite band is Weezer, so this feels unsurprising.
locusofself•7m ago
Crowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.

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