If you hate a song, it’s natural to want to skip it for the next best thing. A couple from the United Kingdom went the extra mile to eliminate their hated tunes. They bonded over their hatred for the song “Last Christmas” by Wham! and the hate is so much that they’re raising money to buy the song rights to take it off the air.
Tomas Mazetti, 55, and his wife Hannah, 33, have jointly raised £51,553 to wipe the song out of music history.
Hannah, a painter, remembers resenting the song 13 years ago when she worked in a café in Oxford where her supervisor would play it in a constant loop. She got the idea from a chat with friends when she announced that she will pay money to never hear it again. That bizarre idea launched an online fundraiser to banish it for good.
It’s a promising fundraising campaign with 327 people that have pledged $62,1375 to eliminate the song. It’s good progress but it’s still a long road ahead. The rights of the song, currently owned by Warner Chappell Music UK, are valued between $15 million and $25 million.
It’s a family mission to wipe the records. Hannah and Tomas’ three kids August, 16, Julian, 10, and Ada, seven, are supportive of their parent’s goals. As a collaborative family unit, they have set a goal of $15,000,000 which will move them to the next stage of negotiations with Warner Chappell Music UK.
The couple doesn’t hate the musician but they clarify that they are exhausted from hearing the song on repeat. It’s like that screeching broken record that you want to desperately toss out. “I’m sorry but this is the way it has to be,” Hannah said. “We don’t hate Wham! but we hate this song. It is because it is being played 5,000 times per day but we felt something had to be done to support the people that suffer like us.”
No creative campaign is complete without some heat from fans. “50 percent get really angry and 50 percent get really happy,” Hannah said. “Some people seem to love to hear the song 500 times a day. And those people are our enemies.”
She added: “They say that there are even worse songs that should be taken off before this — like Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ — and that if we don’t like it we could wear headphones and that it is strange to want to remove something beautiful for the rest of humanity just because we don’t like it.”
Regardless of what people say, they have their efforts fixated on the goal. If the aspirations become a reality, they plan to dump the master recording in a Finnish nuclear waste site where it’ll rest for at least two million years.
Source: https://www.mylondon.news/news/real-life/couple-hate-last-christmas-wham-25827788