There is no such thing as new music anymore. They are all copies of what's been before
Led Zeppelin lifted stuff ranging from the blues artists of the deep south from the mid 1900s to Jimi Hendrix blues licks. If you listen to enough music you'll hear it in Page's playing.
The chords in the background are practically identical - BUT this is bound to happen with so many songs - doesn't equate to copying.
Marvin Gaye's estate just sues everyone it seems. In and out of court every year looking for money
Every song has influenced another song written. Gospel to soul, soul to rock, rock to pop. It doesn't matter. As long as it's a riff we love.
Chord progression may be similar, but then chord progression is not generally protected by copyright as every musical artist knows.The melody however is protected but in the case here is not the same at all, so the claim has no validity. A judge may decide differently but then such persons make wrong decisions daily! He would only be a busker if he had been plying his trade in the eighties.
There are bound to be similarities between musical compositions, it happens in classical music too.
Marvin Gaye's family are going after everyone. The similarities between Got To Give It Up and Blurred Lines are obvious but the others are such a stretch it's almost laughable
I watched someone explain how they are similar and he literally had to slow the song right down and show a couple of specific chord arrangements which were the same. The same they may be but the connection was so tenuous given the final pieces sound completely different. I think the sole determinant is to put 100 people in a room, play both tracks and ask them are they similar? If 50% says yes then guilty of copying and if not then no guilty. It's doesn't matter what the underlying music looks like. It only matters if they sound similar.The US. The most litigious country in the entire world. If there's a sniff of a quick buck to be made, the Yanks are all over it.
Same chord structure which can't be helped as there are exact chord structures on many songs because it's impossible to invent anything different on that side of things. Lyrically and melodically it's totally different. Can't see this lasting long. Look up "4 chords axis of awesome" on YouTube there are literally hundreds of songs with exactly the same chord structure.
There are a limited amount of chords used in modern pop music, they've been recycling them over and over for the past 50 years! There are going to be similarities in most music, is it unoriginal? yes. Is it bland? Yes. Is it copyright infringement?...... no, it's just management companies, estates of passed musicians and lawyers out to make a quick hundred million.
There are only so many notes to use and there has been so many songs written of course some songs may sound similar. These cases are silly - just people trying to get other peoples riches
Sheeran is not an artist in the true sense...he releases lots of songs at one time he had 7 out in the top 20 at the same time...It's a business for him to get to being a Billionaire as quickly as he can..
So at some point in the future, no new music will be created as all new music will be too similar to old music.
Surely the purpose of copyright should be to protect the composer from infringements of their material, not to stifle creativity. I imagine a computer programmer could write an algorithm to find hundreds of similarities between popular tunes without any of them being deliberately copied.
Marvin Gaye's family have a lawyer who basically listens to the works of every successful artist in the hope that there is some similarity in songs. I like Marvin Gaye's stuff but it wasn't like he invented modern music like his family and their accountants think.
I always find these cases utterly stupid. There are only so many combinations of musical notation you can have and at some point you'll have degrees of overlap. To be taking these matters to court is just pure time and money wasting.
The sheer volume of songs that have been churned out since the 50s and 60s means the sequences of a few musical notes is bound to be repeated at some point. It's statistics and maths. . These people are really grasping at straws to cash in on other people's success
Marvin Gaye's family is very aggressive about his intellectual property. This is not the first, nor will it be the last. To quote the composer Igor Stravinsky, "Good composers borrow, Great ones steal". Frankly, Gaye has been gone for 38 years. Most of the songs that composers have borrowed from are 50 years and older. His heirs who did nothing to deserve their windfall have become fat on the royalties of his music and the length of time should be shortened to 50 years after the composition was released to the public
It's all a bit ridiculous in my view since the those claiming infringement had zero to do with the production of the tracks that they claim have been infringed, like they didn't write, record, perform, pay for, promote or produce any of it themselves, they just bought or inherited the estate of those who did. It's my opinion that once the creators of a piece of music have passed away that the rights over that music should just become public license, currently the cut off is around seventy years after they've passed leading to all this absurd litigations, the Hendrix estate, the Marvin Gaye estate are cases in point, they are so jealously heavy handed and litigious and it's not good for the art itself, Hendrix is fading away even among modern guitarists because his estate just won't allow his tracks to continue propagating to new audiences without their unearned cut and his established old fans are dying off, its criminal really
Chord progression, timing and groove are identical if you just listen to the music. That is more coincidence than copy and certainly not intentional.
If you try hard enough, your taste in music is wide enough and you have listened to enough tunes, you can hear familiarity in almost any piece of music written. And the influence of music that spans decades is widely accepted as being influential in song-writing today. It would have to be a note for note copy with the same length and emphasis, the same intervals and timing throughout a piece of work for it to be claimed "a copy".
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