It all started in August when Hardwell, the Dutch house and trance DJ reached the 300,000 fans mark on Facebook. Seems like a joyous occasion for everybody? Wrong! Things got ugly when the young and upcoming DJ Hardwell handed out freebees to celebrate and show appreciation. Turned out, that the free bootleg pack included some Swedish House Mafia’s material. SHM’s Sebastian Ingrosso and Axwell got pissed immediately, Ingrosso commented the move as ’the lowest I’ve seen’.
Inthemix, an Australian music magazine recently chatted with Sebastian Ingrosso, and of course among other things, came up the question about the incident and his current look on things. Ingrosso told to Inthemix:
“This is what I feel. And I stand by my point and I know we got a lot of hate for it, but it doesn’t matter. Because the thing is this: Hardwell is a great producer, he’s a very talented DJ, he is a great guy. Make bootlegs, that’s fine. But if you wanna make bootlegs and gain fans on Facebook, give away your own songs. Like Avicii for example, a good friend of mine, when he got a million fans on Facebook or whatever to say thankyou he gives away a track by his own, he goes to the studio and makes a new song for his 1 million fans. I think that’s f****g brilliant. He can give away as many free downloads as he wants, but it’s kind of weak to give away some other persons song to say thankyou to your fans. But anyway, he said I’m sorry on Twitter because he knew he did something very wrong.”
The public run-down of Ingrosso, Axwell and Hardwell wasn’t pretty. At the end Ingrosso admits they could’ve handled the incident a bit more discretely and not infront of everybody on Twitter. Now that the tempers have cooled down a bit Ingrosso says:“He’s a great dude; he’s young, he’s upcoming. It’s all good now.“