Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music
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Although I personally strive for it, I don't think originality is a point worth discussing. Music is about expression first and foremost. The difficulty we have today is that you can't freely express yourself. Many of the great hip hop records of the 90s, for instance, couldn't be produced today because sample clearing would be a nightmare.
I do, of course, understand that each work requires, errm, work. So I am fine with some form of protection for the artist. But imho it should be a rather broad protection. That is, releasing a cover without permission or selling someone else work (i.e. 100% of the lyrics or melody or even arrangement...) as your own is not ok. But I think as long as there is any form of creative alteration involved then "copying" should be fair play. Especially when several years or even a decade have past.
If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format.
Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply.
The problem with limiting protection to only a few years is that would ensure an even more brutal cycle of song “remakes” for all pop music which would be even more stale than what we have now.
Not quite true for pop melodies especially on basic progressions when you apply all the contraints (harmony related to the current chord, tension/release). Lyrics on the other hand...
> If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format.
yes and no. A chord can be played in many ways. For instance, when you play C major you could play the root an octave below the third and the fifth or one octave up. This alone is no worth copyright. But when the way every single chord of a progression is played is copied it gets questionable, imo. Even more so when you look at "jazzy" chords where you can sprinkle some "non necessary" notes in here and there for color.
> The problem with limiting protection to only a few years is that would ensure an even more brutal cycle of song “remakes” for all pop music which would be even more stale than what we have now.
You could be right, but personally I am not convinced.
Just look at the Fair Use doctrine. It seems to work reasonably well for literature. Why can't it apply to music? In particular this:
> The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair.
If a song has 500 words then wouldn't you say copying 20 is fair?
We have really powerful computers and we know a lot of math, so it's understandably seductive to reduce a problem like this to one that yields to mathematical analysis, but there is something important lost in the reduction. It's a song we're discussing, and not just a progression of chords.
Pop music is free to get more complicated, using reharmonization, voice leading, instrumentation and every other trick in the "real music" book and stop 1/4/5ing us so hard. We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault.
Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented.
Why is it a fault? Music is about what people love. Why should they stretch that to love something else? Because some consider it more "serious"?
>Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented.
It tends to have the problem of very few caring about it -- and that audience is tiny (as seen in streaming rates, sales, etc) compared to other forms of music.
People liked simple melodies and harmonies for several millennia before the advent of a music industry and/or music marketing, so?
>It once wasn't a stretch at all for people to 'hear', love, and make a hit of a harmonically complicated song like Ray Charles' version of 'Come Rain or Come Shine', but now we seem incapable of doing so.
They might have gone to that, but not to Ornette Coleman or Schoenberg or Berg.
>Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down?
I'd say, it's complicated. Basically, it's not the people's tastes in music that have been dumbed down per se, but the role that music plays in people's lives that has been dumbed down with mass constant access and music as muzak. But while you mention Come Rain or Come Shine or some such, I don't see e.g. Louie Louie being that elaborate, or Tea for Two for that matter.
Heck, most rock n' roll of the 50s is the same BS chords and similar melodic lines over again with sophomore lyrics. And yet in the 70s people listened to 12+ minute long "opuses" and solos (that while requiring technical dexterity, aesthetically and culturally they were as much a joke as Nicky Ninaj, complete with King Arthur references and trivial re-uses of classical harmonies and pointless soloing).
So, it's complicated.
That may be, but the music industry is much more about industry than music. Artists like Radiohead only want to "protect their art" when there's a chance of getting a worthwhile check in to the bargain.
“To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”
These law suits are not about art.
- They haven't heard of those smaller artists
- They want to give the struggling small timers a break
- They don't think it's worth their time because nobody is going to hear those small timers' songs anyway
- They don't want to appear as though they are bullying vulnerable smaller artists
However, as sales are declining and it gets harder and harder to make a sustained living even for fairly popular artists, this will change more and more. Laws have been implemented almost solely in favor of copyright holders (=companies and usually not the artists) and in almost complete disregard for art.
There will be many more lawsuits of this kind in the future, and once the dam is broken, more large companies will jump in, too. Hobby musicians will get sued more and more, too, or at least their shares will be taken away from them.
The vast majority of all pop songs is not original in the pro-IP and anti-art sense that lawmakers have facilitated over time, so it's going to be a large bloody legal slaughtering for the remaining bread crumbs.
But maybe hobby music and private performances will benefit this in the long run. Mainstream music will become even less melodic and weirder than it already is, as these songs (e.g. in contemporary "R&B") are developed to avoid lawsuits while still kind of "sounding like a hit". It's a tricky business.
I think this is a great example for what you're describing:
Anne-Marie - Ciao Adios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqob4D3BoZc
Sounds actually quite fresh!
I have to disagree with this. And it's already allowed with Compulsory Licensing. The writer of the song gets their cut as specified in the law.
As to the rest of your comment, I don't think you mean "broad protection." Broad protection is exactly what allows 'silly' lawsuits. Something that's "too similar" gets into trouble because the protection for the original is too broad.
Now, making a transformative work based on others is where I feel things get interesting and there should be lots of flexibility and leeway for the transforming artist. But how that could possibly be codified into law I have no idea...
"cover without permission": I meant to say stealing everything from a song (text+music) 100% while claiming it is your own.
"broad protection": apparently not the correct word. I meant to say, the law should be less strict.
> Now, making a transformative work based on others is where I feel things get interesting and there should be lots of flexibility and leeway for the transforming artist.
yeah, I agree.
So, what's not to understand? Seems very well defined. Melodies and lyrics are more important than sounds and chord progressions.
Arrangements only matter if they're sold as sheet music.
Specific recordings and samples of specific arrangements are covered by a different kind of copyright ("mechanicals").
There is nothing arbitrary about this. Good melodies are incredibly hard to write, and certainly much harder than a generic chord sequence.
The industry has always had backrooms of songwriters - some famous, some not - working on new songs. Today the work is done by topliners who work exclusively on melody and lyrics.
The good ones are very in demand, even though most people have no idea who they are.
Hmmm... that doesn't correspond with my experience at all.
Melodies are quite simple, conceptually -- there are only 12 notes.
Whereas for chords, I couldn't personally begin to count them, but according to the first source which popped up in Google, for four-note chords, there are 495. [1] And they're incredibly complex, with whole arguments (and probably dissertations) on how to properly categorize and name them and how they function.
In my experience composing, almost melodies feel like the easier part. Because it's only when you combine them with expressive and unique harmonies (chords) that they take on a distinctive personality and meaning of their own. Personally, I feel like the real creativity is in the harmonies, but the real point is that neither is meaningful without the other.
Example: hum "The Girl from Ipanema" to yourself without harmonies -- it's the most boring, repetitive thing ever. Then add harmonies -- suddenly it becomes a lot more reasonable that it's the second most recorded pop song in history (according to Wikipedia).
(Also, why compare "good melodies" with a "generic chord sequence"? Better to compare good with good.)
[1] https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/19696-digging-deeper-...
Whereas for chords, I couldn't personally begin to count them, but according to the first source which popped up in Google, for four-note chords, there are 495. And they're incredibly complex, with whole arguments (and probably dissertations) on how to properly categorize and name them and how they function.
That's irrelevant though.
The "complexity" of chords is just the result of a combinatorial explosion based on a few simple rules (adding this or that note of the scale, inverting in this or that way, etc). In fact any random cluster of notes one can hit (e.g. by throwing a bowling ball at their piano's keys) is a chord and can have some sort of name. That doesn't name it particularly useful, or anything worth much studying.
The complexity of melodies on the other hand, is much more esoteric and intuitive (you know it when you hear it), and thus much more difficult to write a great one.
>(Also, why compare "good melodies" with a "generic chord sequence"? Better to compare good with good.)
Because a good melody would be cherished by everybody, whereas few care for a good chord sequence (sans melody) except music nerds.
>Example: hum "The Girl from Ipanema" to yourself without harmonies -- it's the most boring, repetitive thing ever.
That's BS, I'd say. In fact, solo performances by monophonic instruments and a cappella singing wouldn't be interesting either if that was true in general (that no harmonies = boring).
> Whereas for chords, I couldn't personally begin to count them, but according to the first source which popped up in Google, for four-note chords, there are 495.
OK, but one note isn't a melody. How many notes are in a melody? 10? 20? Even with 10 notes, 12^10 > 495, by a long shot.
Then add timing and rhythm. No, melodies are not simpler than chords.
The advent of home recording studios and cheap-to-free distribution channels means more self-produced composers are skipping the editing process.
Crediting a composer on silence is a copyright case:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/35...
It shouldn't even be copyrightable. The guitar is full of things like this that are not great feats of musical theory but simple physical movements that are bound to happen. This is why guitar music generally sounds so derivative, because there are a number of obvious steps that all players will find quite quickly.
Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
Edit: typo
What is subject to copyright is the melody. That’s what they got the claim on. The vocal melody.
If I copy a song, then lose an infringement suit to the original composer, can I really claim a subsequent infringement?
Pick up a guitar and strum that progression in the rather obvious way that it appears on either record (like someone who is rather less than a virtuoso). Now add some words so the syllables fit with the strumming pattern...If you are not now singing that dreary melody you are a true musical genius.
The future of music is stuff that sounds good but not because you've already heard it. To create it you need a vivid musical imagination, not randomly messing around with an instrument. Read about Michael Jackson's creative process. He would imagine a song fully in his head and then sing each note of each part to his band: "here's the first chord, first note, second note, third note. Here's the second chord..."
The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe, Radiohead - Creep, Lana Del Rey - Get Free
Then maybe I'd make some argument about anyone who made 3 left turns and a right turn to get to the court house today owes me a royalty for using my elegant route without my permission. If you want to get to the court house tomorrow you have to figure out any other permutation but mine.
E major, G# major, A major, A minor
The song is in E major, yet G# major and A minor are not chords in that scale.
> Why should you get paid for the guitar equivalent of pressing all of the white notes on a piano?
Firstly, no. All the white keys are consistently in one key, e.g. C major
Secondly, although Lana's infringement may have honestly been accidental, the progression and melody are extremely similar to Creep.
Guitarists learning scales? I mean like the names of the notes rather than the shapes they make on the neck? I am suggesting that knowledge of musical theory had no part in this at all. You need to think in the terms of an indie guitarist of average ability like Thom Yorke. Open, the fret after the one with the dot on, the next fret with a dot, now take your little finger off. That is how I learnt to play Creep in the mid-ninetees! That is how (non-classical) guitarists tend to learn, and why so many people can play guitar.
> Firstly, no. All the white keys are consistently in one key, e.g. C major
The equivalent, not the same as.
I'm probably not supposed to say this sort of thing here, but you're surely trolling.
However I would never claim to be a musician. I don't read music, I don't think in scales. I used to hang round with music students who marvelled at my solo improvisations, but I couldn't compete with them when it came to music theory. I learned the blues scale shape and added the interesting notes which my friends had proper names for..but it didn't stop me playing songs.
Those who do learn music theory have my utmost respect, they could do harmonic things I can only marvel at, but I knew 20x more guitarists that just learned songs from the magazines (before the internet), song books and each other until they had enough building blocks to do their own thing
I find that Radiohead creates quite interesting music from a theory perspective. Learn to play songs like "no surprises" and "paranoid Android" from Ok Computer. They venture outside of normal key in various ways.
Being able to learn an existing song via memorization without understanding does not imply that the creator didn't have a clue.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression here. I base my supposition about how Radiohead constructed their early hits from learning to play them. I like 'No suprises', which I learned for the vocal challenge, but I think this bears me out. IIRC the song opens with an arpeggio using a simple open-D shape behind a capo high up the neck which gives that interesting tone. The second chord just involves shifting a finger to change the bass note, and the D shape can be maintained right through to the little ditty before it repeats. It sounds pretty but I can't believe he wrote that on a score and then found a way to play it. It seems to be that he had been fiddling around with the classic guitarists trick of holding a chord shape and moving the bass note around, noting what sounds good. The skill is surely in taking that little ditty and translating it into a song.
From the same album IIRC was 'Fake Plastic Trees'. I remember being staggered by the exotic chord names and the amazing sounds it made. then I set out to learn it, and again they are classic chord shapes with shifting bass notes etc.
So I wont credit Thom Yorke with having been a great guitar player back then, or even having somehow composed those songs with the aim of trying out interesting theoretical concepts. I will credit him with a great ear for turning those little tricks into songs.
Since this is HN I will note that his wiki says he does not read music[0] and that the rest of the band take his little sketches and develop them harmonically.
Your comment reminded me of Hendrix - most if not all of what he did seems to fit under 'stuff found by messing around on a guitar, moving chords/bass notes around, experimenting with sounds', mostly with no 'theoretical base' whatever except for developing what sounded good, what was fun to explore. In a word, playing.
Personal note: Someone played me Radiohead a few years ago for a while, I'd never heard them before. I remember thinking - I can see why this would sound amazing/mindblowing to someone who'd never heard anything but mainstream/charts/popular/etc rock. Like someone who'd only seen Hollywood movies discovering the whole world of movie-making for the first time. (I'm into jazz, classical, funk, reggae, indian classical etc etc)
Radiohead is a pretty popular and well-known band, so you have to pretend you don't know them, while at the same time disparaging them - not for anything related to their actual music, but for the people liking them not being hipsterish enough. This is the epitome of hipsterness.
Q.E.D.
Not the most common progression, but a Google on it led to Reddit where a few other examples came up -- part of the chorus of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" ("this is ground control to Major Tom") or ELO's "Tightrope".
One problem with "Creep" is that it is a simple four chord loop, unlike the above songs. Nothing wrong with a four bar chord loop, but four chord loops alone really aren't unique enough to be copyrightable (MHO). Four chord loops are a staple of basic rock and roll (garage rock and punk etc.). Because the scope of triad movement is limited in these styles, the chords you are playing (and even to some degree the melodies that come from this) have probably been done before a long time ago. Think for instance what would happen if the "12 bar blues" progression or the "doo wop progression" (I-vi-IV-V) which dominates 1950s music was placed under lock and key.
Inevitably bands in four chord loop mode step on each other and produce similar sounding songs. When I played in a cover band, we played with this sort of thing to deliver "two songs at once" moments. For example, Puddle of Mudd's "She Hates Me" has the exact same chords (and pacing!) as Suicidal Tendencies' "I Saw Your Mommy" -- both are Emaj Amaj F#maj Bmaj. The chorus of the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" and the Troggs' "Wild Thing" (I-IV-V-IV in Amaj, somewhat similar rhythm) are also similar enough where you can swap between the two mid song. In modern times, enough modern country songs used the exact same chord loops and pacing (roughly IV-I-V in Bmaj) for someone to make a mashup of six of them playing simultaneously. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o) It would have been fun to cover this mashup. :)
Radiohead has a stronger case on the melody, but there's a point where I wonder where the threshold of uniqueness should lie. Due to the relative complexity, it would be IMHO pretty difficult for someone to accidentally come up with "Space Oddity" or "Tightrope" chorus. On the other hand, I personally can easily see accidentally coming up with the Creep melody with these chords (this seems like a very similar situation to the Tom Petty "I Won't Back Down" / Sam Smith "Stay With Me" situation). IMHO, if something is easy to accidentally create, it shouldn't be unique enough for copyright protection.
Edit: Also you can write any computer program by simply pressing the buttons on a computer keyboard in the right order.
But you couldn't write many useful programs by simply typing the top row of the keyboard in ascending order and repeating for 3 minutes 59
> you can play any pop/rock song by sliding an open E chord up and down the neck and sometimes taking a finger off.
Exactly, why do we allow them to copyright them? The point with 'Creep' is that they are physically close together and in a simple order. Its a great beginner song for someone learning barre chords
I thought your comment was saying that Creep in particular is just a series of major and minor chords, not that songs in general are just series of major and minor chords. If the argument is that songs in general shouldn't be copyrightable then fair enough I guess.
you gave only one similarity, the truth is that the rythm and melody are also 100% identical, and one would argue the sound is pretty similar as well ( but it's more due to both songs being western rock/pop).
Listen to the voices‘ melodies of „my modern manifesto“ (Lana) vs „I‘m a weirdo“ (Radiohead) - that’s so blatantly copied I almost can’t believe it. If she were a hobbyist, I might believe that her subconscious sneaked it all in without her noticing, but I don’t believe all the producers and test audiences this has been run by haven’t noticed.
The chorus is completely different, and so is the instrumentation and musical style. It is a close call whether I'd call that plagiarism.
Where does it end, LOL...
If musicologists for Lana Del Ray can find an out-of-copyright work such as a very old classical piece or folk song that uses that progression, the potential lawsuit would have no merit. Until then, that chord progression's very identifiable "chromatic movement and eerie tension" is easy to notice so it will always attract new lawsuits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%9...
Edit: Btw I'm not sure I-III-IV-iv is that uncommon. It's in eg. David Bowie's Space Oddity and Pink Floyd's Nobody Home. It sounds to me like an old jazz / ragtime type progression although I'm struggling to come up with examples.
Consider flamenco. It has about 10 base styles each with a specific scale, melody (yes you are reading right!), beat, and structure. Then there are a variety of variations, that perhaps change the structure or mix in another melody.
Between the base melody parts, there are falsetas which are unique melodies. These are also shared between guitarists. Some are considered popular and are untraceable, if their first appearance is near the time of the invention of recording devices.
The lyrics are also shared between singers. In fact it is quite rare for a singer to compose any new lyrics of his own!
Furthermore flamenco does not really have “songs” like pop music has. There is simply performance, where singers, guitarists, dancers and palmeros play. Never a specific song, but just one style so that the structnure is agreed and known. No one owns a verse, a melody or a dance move.
Flamenco is a music world totally incompatible with the western notion of copyright, because it falls apart. Really the o ly thing that can be agreed on is that one particular recording of a performance can have copyright.
As you see, that’s just part of being human!
The whole music industry is stolen. And the worse part of this issue is that Radiohead is not making a dollar less because of Lana Del Rey, instead they just want to make some more of of her.
For some reason most people in this world want to own too many things they never should own in the first place. Intellectual property should only come into play if it really harms the 'original' authors revenue because of a straight copy.
Anybody who's ever been into blues in any form knows it's how you play it. Folks who have been into blues have been some of the most successful musicians ever (see: Fleetwood Mac, pre Buckingham Nicks)
If you say 'love' or 'hate' in sincerity, does it matter that you've not come up with an innovative way to spell it? It's part of an expression of your intention.
Copyright seems a way to try and protect these intangible things by tying them to a more abstracted 'key', and there's the problem.
I've recently listened to the Pixies' 'Brick Is Red', off Surfer Rosa. If you defined their vocal melodies in terms of Hz rather than quantizing them to nearest chromatic note and sixteenth-note timing, you'd find the vocalizations were really REALLY distinct (and next to impossible to reproduce!)
Hanson are on record as saying that their hit 'Mmmbop' is never covered properly. They're absolutely right. The chorus words go into a really fast triplet feel that's not a straight subdivision of the beat, a triplet feel that's not doubled by other instruments, and to screw up that timing means you're screwing up something very fundamental to the hit quality of the song.
One of the basic problems here is boiling stuff down to abstractions that serve as 'keys'. 'Mmmbop' in sixteenth notes is not 'Mmmbop'. 'Brick Is Red' in MIDI is not 'Brick Is Red'.
To be honest, probably anyone can tell that the intro and first verse is a quite clear case of plagiarism. First 10-20 seconds is enough. It's the same melody, same chords and even a similar way of playing those chords with a guitar.
The Hollies and Radiohead, though, yeah, that's very similar accompanying music.
What I love about the open-source movement is its embrace of letting others take what they want from your work, be it the entire program, just a function, or just a principle (not actually copying a single line verbatim). Maybe this is because you learned early on that it was never "your" work in the first place, but that you too had learned and copied from others.
It seems to be that society doesn't understand the creation of art. To most people the artist is a wizard behind closed doors, creating works of genius from nothing. This is why our copyright laws are too strong and too strict. In truth, I think not just some but all artists work how I do: taking something they like, bending it with something else that they like, and adding a pinch of something else they thought was cool.
Further differentiation happens in the execution. For example, if you're making a movie, a character you wrote may have been more obviously a rip-off in the script, but now that you have this new actor playing it, it naturally diverges further. Or you try to do a camera move you saw in movie, but your own skill keeps you from executing it perfectly, and it takes on its own character. Differences in the location and lighting further obscure the shot's influence.
Here's the problem - your average jury/judge/lawyer does not have the required music theory knowledge to understand how asinine Radiohead's case is. There is a short list of 3-, 4- and 5-chord harmonic progressions that literally 90% of popular music is based on. What makes these songs different is the overlying melody and (to a lesser degree) the rhythm. Because these progressions are so commonly used, your mind doesn't automatically go "this song sounds like that song" because they all somewhat sound like each other (in a harmonic sense) and none really sticks out. We focus instead on the melody and rhythm.
Now in the case of this Lana Del Rey song, she is using a far more rare chord progression in the verse where the last chord in the progression moves from a major chord to the minor of the same chord instead of resolving to the tonic. It creates the sense of dark tension in the song. Radiohead also uses this technique in Creep. Lana has really done nothing different from all the other pop musicians who use the same harmonic progressions as each other, but in this case there are very few songs to compare it to since it's a very non-standard progression. So when you hear this next to Creep, your brain goes "wow they do sound very similar". The melody of the vocals in the verse seems to carry some similarity to Creep as well, but it's really a pretty natural melodic line to sing over that progression due to how strong the color of the harmonic sequence is. Most importantly, the chorus shares nothing in common with the chorus of Creep.
In court, Radiohead will likely win because the general population just does not understand this in-depth. They haven't written music and therefore don't get how easily one song can sound like another with absolutely no plagiarism intended. The sad thing, to me, is that Radiohead DOES understand this and they are still choosing to go ahead with the lawsuit against another creative artist. I guess that's what happens when you still need to make money and your career effectively ended decades ago.
Though I’m sure you know that and were just angry.
I never understood why people listen to radio music and don't even know what is out there, it's like seeing the same dull basic painting over and over again.
It is interesting that even electronic artists tend to operate within the constraints of the western tradition. It is probably a struggle to find an audience once you start doing wacky things. Or maybe it will happen, but has not yet.
That isn't remotely true. Yes, you can choose to quantize to a 4/4 grid, but that isn't mandatory. You can choose to operate in equal temperament, but it's relatively straightforward to work microtonally in most DAWs, particularly Reaper. Hugely popular instruments like Xfer Serum, ZynAddSubFX and UVI Falcon have full support for microtuning.
IMHO, it's far easier to make properly weird music in software than with traditional instruments. You have a vastly greater range of timbral choices, you have total control over intonation and you can program complex polyrhythms that would be far beyond the abilities of most professional musicians. If you really want to go balls-out on the weird, just learn Pure Data - there's literally nothing that it can't do.
If you sum the dissonances on the Plomp-Levelt curve of every pair of harmonics from multiple sounds played at once, weighted by the amplitude of those harmonics, you get a good approximation of perceived dissonance. String and wind instruments make sounds with harmonics at (approximately) integer multiples of the fundamental. If you graph the calculated dissonance of frequency intervals of such sounds, the minima will match the intervals of the traditional Western scale.
Other instruments, such as tuned percussion, can have prominent harmonics at non-integer multiples of the fundamental. This requires different tuning for maximum consonance. Indonesian classical music, with its extensive use of tuned percussion, is well known for this.
You can of course ignore this, but most people like their music to be mostly consonant, and if you arbitrarily change tuning you're very likely to end up with something that's mostly dissonant.
[0] http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_... [1] http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf (less formal summary: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html )
To complicate matters further, pianos deviate substantially from equal temperament at the extremes of their range. A piano sounds more in tune if the bass notes are tuned slightly flat and the treble notes are tuned slightly sharp, to accommodate for the natural inharmonicity of the strings.
It happened twenty four years ago, they were called Autechre[1]. I'm sure someone was doing it before them. I have a theory that this came out of The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, and electronic music actually benefited from the legislation in the long run, but I won't go into it here[2] & [3]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre#Recording
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...
This kind of IP shenanigans is going to continue for as long as the burden of proof is on the party doing the "infringing." YouTube and platforms like it are built with this inherent bias toward copyright holders, despite the absurd frequency of false positives. On one hand, I can see how this might protect, say, indie film studios who don't have the resources to chase after everyone who posts their movies on YouTube illegally. At the same time, when a system's incentives result in bullshit like Fair Use protections being completely ignored[0], it's time for a new system.
Mammoth, centralized systems like YouTube are, unfortunately, still Really Hard to maintain without the backing of a proportionately mammoth company with lots of resources. You can be sure that that company's interest will often align with those of others with deep pockets. So in my mind, as with many of the big problems on today's internet, the technical aspect of this challenge really stems from centralization itself.
pun intended
Things inspire people, people copy, there isn't an infinite amount of good ideas.
Frankly creep is old enough that I'd argue it should be copyable. Just like other ideas. But alas the Mickey Mouse laws are really hindering progress IMO.
Has Pop Music Lots Its Fun? https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/fb84bf19-29c9-4ed3-b6b6...
People like what they already know...
Are there any precedents regarding cases like these? If, for some peculiar reason, Radiohead wins this case, then I can imagine they'll have the ability to just sue anyone that becomes popular that uses a similar chord progression / melody. Considering that "original music" is almost non-existent in pop music, what's going to happen then?