Did Lindsey Buckingham Take Fleetwood Mac’s Getty Images Password With Him?
Kevin Winter/Getty
Fleetwood Mac are currently touring the country without Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist whose entry to the band in the mid-’70s (along with Stevie Nicks) inaugurated what is now widely considered to be their classic period. (Sorry, Peter Green fans.) Buckingham departed Mac in April, over what was apparently a disagreement about touring schedules. Whether he quit or was fired depends on who you ask. But even more important than the precise nature of Buckingham’s exit is another lingering question: Did he take Fleetwood Mac’s Getty Images password with him?
Just look at the following images, which originally appeared in a Consequence of Sound review of a recent show in Chicago:
fleetwood mac didn't clear getty images for their tour stage design i'm yelling pic.twitter.com/vhsLJCWz4J
— Carrie Courogen (@carriecourogen) October 9, 2018
As CoS’s reviewer Michael Roffman also noted: Those photos still have watermarks on them! For those readers who don’t have jobs that require regular use of licensed images from wire services like Getty—such as, oh, I don’t know, writer at a music website—those little tags are a way for Getty to preview their wares without allowing you to pirate them, and they appear when you view or download a photo but aren’t actually logged into a paid account. Getty doesn’t advertise subscription rates on their website, but a 2010 Gigaom article puts them in the range of a couple hundred dollars a month.
Even if rates have gone up since then, it seems like they should be affordable for one of the most commercially successful bands of all time. Unless, of course, Buckingham was the person who had access to the account, and it would be too awkward to call him up and ask for the password, but they also don’t want to just start a whole new account, because that just seems like a waste. Again, if you’re someone who uses such a service for your job, this sort of feeling is probably relatable, and may seem entirely reasonable to you. Then again, footage from a more recent concert shows the same sequence of images, this time without watermarks, so maybe they got it all sorted.
Fleetwood Mac: If, for whatever reason, you’re still in need of a Getty Images password, just let us know and we’d be happy to share ours. Just don’t tell them we said so, because that seems like a terms of service violation.
This article originally appeared on Spin.
