Now It’s Easy to Sample the ‘Hawk Tuah’ Girl
Haliey Welch partners with BeatStars on a vocal pack for producers.
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Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” announced the launch of her own vocal sample pack on Wednesday (Nov. 20). Producers looking to sample Welch will be able to do so via BeatStars, the popular online beat marketplace.
It’s a shrewd move by Welch: Her voice has already been sampled willy-nilly since she went viral this summer. Now she has the chance to make some money from future samples, in the form of license fees and a cut of publishing income from every instrumental that uses snippets of her vocals through BeatStars.
“Imagine waking up to hundreds of new songs in your DMs that include your voice,” Welch said in a statement. “That’s what’s been happening to me for months and it tickles me to no end. Some artists do ask for my approval, but it seemed like such a weird process.” Now that process will be streamlined and standardized — easy for sample-happy producers to figure out, and set up in a way so that Welch can benefit.
Mike Trampe, director of BeatStars publishing, started to hear beats sampling Welch almost as soon as she went viral. “Haliey’s voice was being used all over the internet, from TikTok to remixes of songs,” he says. “It made me curious: When people’s voices are being used as instruments, and are they properly protected and collecting” money for those uses?
In August, Trampe reached out to Jonnie Forster, from Welch’s management team at The Penthouse, with a pitch: Make “a sample pack that [Welch] owned,” allowing her to “dictate her own terms” for any sampling agreements.
In a statement, Forster said that Welch’s “meme transcended pop culture so quickly that we needed a trusted solution to protect Haliey’s IP on both the publishing and master sides.” On top of partnering with BeatStars, Welch joined ASCAP.
