EDM Twitter Beef: Nicky Romero Accuses Hardwell of Stealing Visuals

The latest DJ Twitter beef finds A-List EDM stars Nicky Romero and Hardwell fighting over visuals. As Billboard reports, the former tweeted "Copying is the highest form of flattery" after the latter posted an 8-bit rendition of himself.

The subtweet didn't mention names or even a specific instance of plagiarism, so as is the nature of Twitter, fans immediately responded with questions as well as support, mostly agreeing that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Romero then fired off another pointed tweet to clarify that his issue is specifically with "some other DJ that just tweeted a 8bit image of him during his performance."

Though Romero still resisted dropping any names, Hardwell caught on quickly and denied the allegations. Through a series of tweets, the Dutch DJs hash-out various timelines in which each artist worked with 8-bit imagery of themselves.

First, Hardwell insists that his version of the visuals are from his January stop at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome arena while touring in support of his debut studio album, United We Are. You can watch two hours of that show via the artist's YouTube and keep an eye out for those 8bit visuals (or just enjoy the show), below.

As Your EDM explains, the visuals that inspired the copy-cat allegations are from Romero's DJ Mag project, an 8-bit video game accompanied by a remastered version of his most-played song, "Toulouse." The project went live over the summer, so Hardwell insisted that his use of the 8-bit visuals predated Romero's by nearly half a year. You can check out the campaign in the video below.

As most DJs tend to be obsessive archivists, Romero, of course, responded by tweeting screenshots presumably of when his 8-bit project was created, also in January.

As far as DJ Twitter beef goes, most EDM fans would likely agree that this argument borders on the trivial. While most would agree on the importance of giving credit where it's due, they would also agree that it's likely that neither artist could really claim to be the sole pioneer of using 8-bit visuals to support their music.

It's not like the duo just can't get along; they've worked together in the past. Watch the video for the DJs' 2011 collaborative track, "Beta," below.

Tags

Nicky Romero, Hardwell, EDM