Chance The Rapper Critiques Fortnite's Emotes

Hip-Hop artist and Fortnite player 'Chance The Rapper' has come out and critiqued the way Epic [...]

chance the rapper

Hip-Hop artist and Fortnite player 'Chance The Rapper' has come out and critiqued the way Epic Games handles Emotes in Fortnite, specifically how it doesn't put the actual music to the dances, and how as a result the creators aren't recieving any type of monetary recognition.

The musician expressed his views on the matter via the following posts on Twitter:

He continued:

"I would love to be able to buy Hype and also be purchasing Look Alive or buy "Swipe" and be buying it from both @FortniteGame AND 2Milly."

For those that don't know: many of Fortnite's emotes are simply dances extracted from popular culture. And some of these dances come with their own music, which Epic Games doesn't use in order to avoid spending money on licensing. Rather, it uses its own, generic music.

What Chance The Rapper is suggesting is that not Epic Games just write a check to people behind the emotes, but rather use the officially licensed music that comes with the dance, so that way the people who made the dance popular enough to become an emote in the first place, have some way to monetize them.

Chance The Rapper specifically used the example of "Swipe," which is inspired by 2Milly's dance in the video for "Milly Rock," as a way Fortnite could give credit where credit is due by licensing the official music.

Chance The Rapper's tweets bring up an interesting discussion around whether or not choreography can be copyrighted, as well as the topic of ownership in the viral era. At the very least, these are good discussions to have, though in the case of Fortnite, I'm not sure it will result in any change of policy.

But hey, Chance The Rapper did help (maybe?) get the game on Nintendo Switch. So, who knows, maybe something will come of this as well.

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