Update: The Mark Rober team has finally credited me for using my music in their videos.
On March 19, 2024, I received an email from one of Mark’s producers explaining that my music was somehow flagged as “cleared”, as in “cleared, or approved, for use in videos”. He apologized for the lack of credit given and wanted to make things right by retroactively crediting me in their videos and crediting me in any future usage of my song.
He was very polite and we had a great conversation about everything. Ultimately, we decided that they would link to my YouTube channel, where [massive irony incoming] the only longform video I have is the video where I call out Mark Rober for not crediting me in his videos.
Anyway, all of this made for a great story in my book. Thanks to Mark’s team for making things right, and thanks to all who encouraged and supported me along the way.
Original post begins below.
These days, I am mostly known for my silly songs on Instagram and TikTok channels. But I have written a lot of different styles of music over the years.
For a stretch, I was writing background music for videos and released some of them here for royalty-free usage. I have only asked for attribution, and I think people have respected that for the most part.
That is, until recently. Someone let me know that popular engineering YouTuber Mark Rober had used my song, Circus Minute, in one of his videos. I was very excited! To have him use my music – and credit me – might win me some followers, or even a gig writing music for someone’s project. Unfortunately, Mr. Rober did not credit me in his video. And he has used my song at least two times, and in both videos, no mention of me. Sad face. Oddly, he did credit other songwriters for the use of their songs in both videos. So it seems I fell through the cracks. Or he has some method to who he does and doesn’t give credit to.
I did reach out to Mark Rober, and at the time of writing (over 1 month later), I haven’t heard back from him. I’m sure he’s very busy and can’t read all of his mail, but how else is someone supposed to get in touch? Well, if you are a silly-song writer, you spend way too many hours recording music and video to tell Mr. Rober about his glaring omission. So that’s what I did.
Feel free to tag Mark Rober and link him to my video, if you like. I’m still on the lookout for that attribution, and maybe an apology.