Ali Spagnola

Alicia Dawn Spagnola (born December 18, 1984) is a musician and YouTuber.[1][2][3] She created a Power Hour Drinking Game Album that contains 60 one-minute songs. She also created several of the ringtones shipped on multiple Android phones.[4] Her YouTube channel has over 1,000,000 subscribers, and mainly features videos of popular songs re-imagined in the style of other artists. Spagnola also makes videos on the social media platform TikTok.

Ali Spagnola
Born (1984-12-18) December 18, 1984
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation(s)Musician and YouTuber
Notable workAli Spagnola's Power Hour Drinking Game
Websitealispagnola.com

Early life

Spagnola was born in a town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began studying dance, jazz, ballet, and piano at a young age. She was a percussionist in her school band, subsequently picking up the guitar and taking voice lessons. Spagnola went to Carnegie Mellon University to study art. After school, she became an animator and then lead artist at a video game company in Pittsburgh, notably creating graphics and animations for the score board on the Toy Story Mania! game at Walt Disney World. During that same time, Spagnola also held a job as sound designer for Android, composing UI sounds, alarms and ringtones. Her songs such as "Radiation" and "Robots for Everyone" were shipped as default ringtones for Android devices such as the Nexus One, Motorola Droid, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4.[5]

Career

Free Paintings

In 2008, Spagnola started a project called Free Paintings. She takes requests online via email about what she should paint. She fills requests whenever she can creating a 12x12", bright, pop art, acrylic painting. She then mails the painting to the requester for free. Requests are filled on a first come first served basis. The wait list is reported to be over 1,300 people long. She has completed 2,517 paintings for the project and still continues to create one square foot of art a day.[6]

Music

Spagnola has released four self-published albums. Some of these songs have been featured on MTV's The Real World[7] and Oxygen's Bad Girls Club. In December 2012, Huffington Post included her performance of "HuffPost Weird News" on their "End Of The World Playlist".[8]

The Power Hour Drinking Game

In college, Spagnola began playing "drinking game concerts" by taking the idea of a "power hour" - drinking 60 shots of beer in an hour - and mixing it with a live show. She wrote 60 one-minute drinking songs and performed them live while people drank along with every song. Spagnola later recorded the songs to create The Power Hour Album. She also designed, developed and manufactured her new Shot Glass USB, a shot glass with a removable USB drive that holds The Power Hour Album.[9][10][11][12][13]

In 2010, Steve Roose, who markets a DVD game named "Power Hour", registered a trademark of the same name and soon after began sending cease-and-desist orders to Ali Spagnola.[14][15][16] Spagnola announced her intentions to fight the claims, and an intellectual-property professor from the University of Pittsburgh has stated that "if 'Power Hour' is a generic description of 'a drinking game that involves drinking a shot of alcohol each minute for an hour,' then Mr. Roose can't have any trademark rights at all."[14]

In December 2012, the Roose trademark was invalidated.[17]

Discography
  • Ali Spagnola (2007)
  • Free of Style (2007)
  • The Ego (2010)
  • The Power Hour Album (2011)

References
  1. "ALI SPAGNOLA". Xcents-mag.com. 12 January 2015. Archived from the original on 31 October 2016. Retrieved 14 January 2018.
  2. Ali Spagnola [@alispagnola] (19 June 2015). "@Gysgtlalo Dawn" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  3. "CMU School of Art ][". Archived from the original on 2015-10-12. Retrieved 2016-01-01.
  4. "Ali Spagnola". www.alispagnola.com. Retrieved 2023-04-28.
  5. "ALI SPAGNOLA: THE HISTORY OF ALI, YOUR BEST PAL-Y". alispagnola.com. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  6. Mogin, Sarah (April 7, 2007). "Finding art on campus". The Tartan. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
  7. "Music from Real World St Thomas Episode 2". MTV. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
  8. "Doomsday Ditties: Songs For The End Of The World". Huffington Post. 17 December 2012. Retrieved 18 December 2012.
  9. Larry Getlen. "'Power' chords: New song cycle pays tribute to collegiate drinking game". New York Post. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  10. Hugh Hart (26 January 2012). "Shot Glass USB Delivers Party-Ready Power Hour Album". Wired. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  11. Sean Collier. "CMU Grad Creates Power Hour, the Album". Pittsburgh Magazine. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  12. Mario Aguilar. "I Will Buy Your USB Shot Glass, Rad Power Hour Girl, and Then I Want to Marry You". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
  13. Haley, Sebastian (October 12, 2012). "Alcoholic techies, rejoice: The Shot Glass USB is for you". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
  14. Welsh, Margaret (May 20, 2010). "Can a drinking game be trademarked? Local musician Ali Spagnola hopes not". Pittsburgh City Paper.
  15. Masnick, Mike (May 11, 2010). "Can We Make A Power Hour Drinking Game Around Ridiculous Trademark Disputes?". techdirt.
  16. Haffeman, Robert. "Power Hour Drinking Game Is In Jeopardy". Heavy. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
  17. "Opposition No. 91195461" (PDF). UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE. 31 December 2012. Retrieved 23 January 2013.
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