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Ariana Grande rebukes White House for using her music in ‘barbaric, inhumane’ ICE video
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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A bunch of these artists should get together and do a "We Are the World" style video performing a parody cover of Nugent's Jailbait written to refer explicitly to all the accusations and charges against Trump. Well, as long as Nugent doesn't get any money from it. Do artists get paid when another artist does a cover or parody?
Cover yes parody no. Weird Al famously asks for permission to parody songs but he doesn't have to.
A parody is usually the same melody, but different lyrics. If I wrote the melody and lyrics, and you change just the lyrics, I would still get partial songwriting credit for that melody, and partial songwriting royalties.
Weird Al would still get full royalties for the performance part, but he would split the songwriting royalties with the original composer.
That's why artists don't mind Weird Al using their songs, because they make money. They like the validation, too, but they aren't giving away their royalties to him so willingly for validation alone.
As long as the parody is transformative, and it has to be a critique of the thing it is parodying. Transformative simply means people won’t reasonably mistake it for the genuine thing.
The second part is where most people run afoul of parody laws though. For instance, you can’t make a parody of Family Guy using the established characters, and use it to make fun of a random politician who has no ties to the TV show. That may be transformative, but it wouldn’t be critiquing Family Guy or anyone connected to the show. It would just be using Family Guy’s characters to make fun of a third party.
That being said, the fact that Ted is now a political activist means you could likely argue that the door was wide open to parody the song and use it to attack conservative politicians that Ted has ties to. Just be sure you do something to attack Ted directly, to be sure you have fulfilled that second part.
Ted would undoubtedly still sue, by trying to claim that it was damaging his market value as a musician. Essentially, the parody has to exist peacefully alongside the original, instead of draining potential revenue. Ted would say that people were listening to the parody instead of his songs, which is lowering his income and harming him financially. If the parody harms the original IP owner financially, it isn’t considered fair use because it is market infringement.
Given, the counter to that would essentially be that the parody’s popularity is driving traffic to Ted’s songs instead of away from them. But that’s something that would need to be proven in court.