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What we see right now is the beginning of the "intellectual property" lawsuit wave. Music producers, artists, and record labels have always known that pop music doesn't come out of thin air and is highly repetitive. For some popular chord progressions and main melodies you can literally find thousands of practically identical songs. Until recently, copyright holders have avoided lawsuits except in cases of blatant copying, because of some form of legal MAD.

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.

> 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!

What I can't figure out is how Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" (TLC - "No Scrubs") and Portugal, The Man's "Feel it Still" (Marelettes - "Please Mr. Postman") flew under the radar. Are the big producers clearing melodies and chord progressions like samples now?

It's likely they haven't flown under the radar, but rather the record labels have negotiated a deal ahead of time, or maybe even the same label owns the rights to both the new and old songs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39336424/no-scrubs-wri...

"...releasing a cover without permission...is not ok."

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...

Sorry, I was a bit unclear as English is not my mother tongue. I thus expressed my thoughts not correctly/clumsy.

"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.

I think this is why remixes exist. For me, I often find the interpretations of others' works sometimes more interesting than the original - this is within music as well as other fields like art in the form of painting/drawing.

That sounds reasonable but how do you define “any form of creativity/expression” legally? That’s the problem.

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.

> Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply

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...

People are pretty flexible in what they’ll accept in a melody. You can play a lot with outside notes and weird rhythms if you have a good performance and as long as you bring it back to diatonic notes.

The market can decide whether or not it wants all those stale remakes, whether with or without legal protection.

That's the problem. The market likes repetitive crap. Artists need to be forced by the courts to be creative. Apparently.

I'd say “any form of creativity/expression” means you take something and don't copy it 1:1. Copying 100% of a (lyric|composition|: not okay, taking a subset of it: fine. Admittedly, it has to be a bit more sophisticated than that. For instance, getting away with just omitting the very last word would be ridiculous.

> 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.

So let’s say I don’t copy 100%... but I asymptotically approach it. At what decimal do I infringe, or as long as I never reach unity am I cool?

Judges are humans not computers. The downside is, some sentences are incredibly unfair. The upside is, it works pretty well most of the time.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Depends which 20. "I knew she was gonna meet her connection" maybe... "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need" def not ok.

And why is it no okay? (Apart from that it is 21 words not 20 but I did not mean to imply it has to be exactly 20. There is room for human common sense and yes, it is not perfect and sometimes unjust.)

The problem I see with your analysis is that you're taking a fundamentally creative and subjective process, reducing it to its output, and then making comparisons based solely on the mathematics of the output. That strikes me as akin to comparing two paintings by counting pairs of brush strokes. The reality is much more complex than that.

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.

Preventing stale remakes probably shouldn’t be a function of copyright law.

You said "there's not many chord progressions to be found inside [a chord progression]".

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.

>We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault.

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.

how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing? 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. Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down?

>how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing?

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.

Music is about expression first and foremost.

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.

How do you know that a worthwhile check has anything to do with Radiohead's motives? What other artists are you implying belong to this group?

They are seeking 100% of the profits for that song. They could ask her to remove the song from the album if they felt like she was biting their music and had no monetary motives.

Perhaps they think that a financial penalty will best discourage future infringers.

Unless you’re basing that on some extra information, you seem to have not read the article.

“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.’ ”

They sue artists who are successful and ignore smaller artists. Clearly it's about the money, otherwise they'd protect their songs against every infringement even if it costs them to do so rather than only protecting songs when there's the possibility of a pay out.

These law suits are not about art.

I don't think it's clear at all. They could be ignoring smaller artists because:

  - 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

I think any of those options are more believable than the idea that a band worth tens of millions of dollars is suing just to pull in publishing royalties on a song that wasn't even one of the singles from an album that didn't even reach gold certification.

Arbitrary would be an understatement. It is downright insane

Crediting a composer on silence is a copyright case:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/35...

>As a hobby music producer I just can't wrap my head around the logic behind copyright infringement. It's so arbitrary. It's illegal to steal a melody but sophisticated chord progressions are fine. It's illegal to copy the text of even the simplest verse but reverse engineering some complex synthesizer sounds is fine.

So, what's not to understand? Seems very well defined. Melodies and lyrics are more important than sounds and chord progressions.

Exactly. Publishing in the music industry means melody and lyrics. Chord sequences aren't copyrighted unless they're outstanding and exceptional, and sometimes not even then.

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.

> There is nothing arbitrary about this. Good melodies are incredibly hard to write, and certainly much harder than a generic chord sequence.

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-...

>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. 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).

> 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.

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 learning curve for composing original music necessarily is one of emulation and derivation. Producers and Publishers have historically provided the copyright editing and filtering role.

The advent of home recording studios and cheap-to-free distribution channels means more self-produced composers are skipping the editing process.