Yeah yeah why is this happening to me

Thank you. Are they substantively the same? Do they have objectively unique creative material? They share elements that are not protectable under copyright, like some percussion sounds and a feel. All right. Do you know that every single Pharrell Williams hit, more or less, starts with four quarter notes at the very beginning of the beat? I know that they all have vocal percussion though. What do you hear when you listen to those two songs? I hear songs which are obviously in conversation with each other.

You have a similar kind of groove. And so this has gotten people really all riled up between those who think that well, yeah, those things sound alike. We could probably go and find plenty of other grooves which are in the same feel. Go back to the doo-wop era.

Doo-wop bands might sound very similar to other people. Actually, I take that pretty directly. Oh, you stole it. This is theft. The argument that the Marvin Gaye estate made was basically that these songs sound alike. Importantly, the Marvin Gaye estate wins this case. This leads to an explosion. This is a sea change in the music business.

Importantly — the ex-copyright attorney in me feels compelled to say this — fair use decisions are supposed to be case by case. That is just not how it works in practice. This leads to an explosion of these cases. Most of the case is decided on procedural issues. There was no determination about why the Marvin Gaye song was objectively a piece of original, protectable material.

It left things big, open, and into this gray area. But yeah, the following couple of years, copyright cases explode because people see an opportunity. That is the overarching concern I think of every musician who is paying attention to these cases, that a lot of these decisions are being made over fundamental building blocks. So can a melody which is just mi, re, do, or a chord progression that uses the four most common chords in pop music, as the Olivia Rodrigo and Paramore songs both do — can we start to say that these are original creations?

That creates an incentive to make more things. That all makes sense to me. So if you can own the building blocks, it is very hard to come up with new building blocks. We can try to get money from other hit songs. One is with Katy Perry , and one is with Led Zeppelin. The Led Zeppelin case was filed first, but it only got resolved in Afterwards, it went up to a quarter million.

So the attention worked for them. I get how you can say they sound the same, but does it matter that Katy Perry probably had never heard that song before? Courts do consider whether or not someone has had access to the prior work, or whether or not these were independent co-creations of the same idea.

That is a factor, actually less and less now, in how courts decide cases. But it is a piece of it. The bigger issue here is, do they share an original piece of musical material, which is objectively creative and protectable?

And I think this is a very wise decision. Because you basically have a mi-re-do sort of melody descending over a very common rhythm. And plenty of great analysis has been done about this; I especially point to the YouTuber Adam Neely who shows that Bach has used this exact same melody. Countless people have used melodies just like it. These are not the same songs. Katy Perry initially loses, but wins in appeal. And especially because they were used differently.

This suggests that both because of the usage and the actual amount of material used, and the kind of material, these are not the same song. And so it sets up this case where we have to think about, can a simple eight-note musical phrase be something open to copyright? Maybe one of the most famous rock songs of all time. It came out in In , a band called Spirit sued Led Zeppelin.

But the melody on top, not the same. This goes back to the question of building blocks. And just for the sake of it, when I think about playing guitar, A minor is one of those first chords that a guitarist learns. One of those is Led Zeppelin; they won in There was an appeal. The Led Zeppelin case only came to a close in , which is an extraordinarily long time to discuss some very basic guitar progressions, and they won again. At the same time, Olivia Rodrigo had a hit, and the internet decided that Paramore needed a credit, and she handed off the credit.

It seems like she could have taken this to court and won. This is an interesting case because I think the main concern here is about whether or not people want to deal with what can happen in court. Court is expensive. The Isley Brothers. And the thin copyright test says that if someone was to borrow from the Isley Brothers, like Michael Bolton supposedly does, that they would need to be substantively similar.

They would have to use many of those same elements. They share more or less the same song structure. They have similar melodic contours. The chord progressions change in a really similar way. The verse chord progression is the same in both songs. The chorus chord progression is the same in both songs. The choruses both start on the same melodic note. They both use a lot of rhythmic syncopation. Well, this was infringed. I think that is the fear. I apologize. This idea of thin copyright, and the idea that you might be copyrighting the curation of all of these different elements together.

Litigation risk, always. You might lose. But as I said, the worst thing is you might lose, and you might get a new precedent that might fundamentally alter the music business. So this is playing out now in the music industry in a variety of ways.

Which is an unsample-able song, even for Drake. Generally, I think so. I think rhythms are hard to copyright.

Every drummer does that same thing. So we are getting into situations of building blocks. They handled this one expertly to just avoid any potential conflict. They gave her the interpolation credit. I did not at all hear it until I played them back to back. I get it. Now, does that make people equal songwriters? But yeah, Olivia Newton-John has a credit on this song for something which is, some courts might argue, de minimis.

I wish that I had deeper reporting to answer that very specific question, but yeah, there are three major labels. Hold up if you want to go and take a ride with me. Better hit me, baby, one more time. I mean, look, nostalgia sells. To pay out to those artists, to pay out to publishing, to spur sales of those songs? Go create interpolations off of those and see if we can create new hits. What is the state of play for artists and songwriters right now? How are they even approaching this?

Because it seems remarkably unstable. What I hear from my reporting is that songwriters are more nervous than ever, and songwriters and artists are speaking a lot less candidly about who their influences are because of a fear of a Olivia Rodrigo-type situation.

And I think that we are seeing songwriters deeply anxious about whether or not they are unintentionally borrowing and are going to lose the potential fortunes that they could make off of US radio hits. What does this mean for creativity? I think that any time that we are starting to litigate the building blocks of an art form, we start to inhibit the way in which people express themselves.

To me, that goes directly counter to the purpose of setting up copyright protection — which is there to incentivize the creation of new modes of expression, not to tamp down free speech. In its consolidation, there has been a lot of new capital moving around. Sign up or log in with. Post meaning. Post meanings U. More Yeah You's lyrics. Ready To Love Again. It's Happening To Me. View 10 more explanations.

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