If you aren't aware, Tom Petty's publishers recently contacted Sam Smith's Publishers about the likenesses between Sam Smith's Stay With Me and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' I Won't Back Down. If you want to hear a successful mash-up of the two hits, look no further. The two artists apparently settled out of court, leaving Tom Petty and LFO's Jeff Lynne with writing credits and 12.5% of the royalties for the song.
Of course, the similarities are obvious. The likeness was not lost on the writers accredited for Stay With Me, despite admitting they were "Not previously familiar with the 1989 Petty/Lynne song..." It makes one wonder how anybody would literally believe a modern pop music writer wouldn't be familiar with a now classic rock and roll tune that only 25 years ago reached the #12 spot on billboard 100, stayed on top of the rock charts for 5 weeks, and was a single from an album that went multi-platinum.
FunnyOrDie released a pretty hilarious Tom Petty satire video on the event. Even though it comes across a little hamfisted, it highlights the hypocrisy of a performer like Petty involving his legal team in starting a dialogue over the similarities between their two hits.
I digress. We all know what it's like to be working on a song for a week, then on your walk between the deli aisle and the beer refrigerator, and the familiar sounding tune that comes over the supermarket speakers makes you realize you've just written "September" by Earth Wind and Fire (or is that just me?) Paul McCartney was apparently worried enough about his song "Yesterday" being a rip-off, that after he recorded the melody to avoid forgetting it, he spent a month searching for songs that he could have unconsciously plagiarized it from.
Unconsciously (or consciously) plagiarizing music has been a source of sticky legal troubles for a number of bands over the years.
We're musicians though. We all understand that some combinations of notes get a lot more use than others as so hilariously demonstrated by the musical comedy group Axis of awesome. We know that catchy songs need to sound a little fresh, without being alienating. They have to be a little predictable, yet have some element of surprise somewhere in the song. They have to use chords that people can easily relate to, feel without processing. Most importantly, they have to follow a pretty standard song structure to get anywhere.
Writing pop tunes is a business venture like any other, that requires balance between taking risks, and using tried and true methods. An attempt at a successful hit will take a chassis that's been used in many successful models, design a flashy looking body that fits the style of the day, slap a hood ornament on it so you know who made the damn thing, and send it down the production line. Many people might argue that this assembly line style of production is not where the innovation lies, and that criticism should extend toward most pop artists who refuse to acknowledge the sources of their often "familiar" sounding inspirations.
I'm talking about the "little guys". The underground artists, the avant garde explorers, the travelling minstrels, experimenters, and the sonic style pioneers who have a dedicated but stylistically insular cult of followers. People who have only made appearances on internet forums or music hosting sites. Or in an art venue, where the sound artist demonstrating their concept of musical sculpture asks you to wear a blindfold and be pushed down a tunnel surrounded with meticulously placed speakers built from salvaged items found in ukraine in a 1970s kitchen-appliance prototype studio that was condemned and abandoned for 30 years after a chemical facility exploded in the town. Hell... anything you'd find in a copy of WIRE magazine. These are the kinds of people that many of us may suspect are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to being compensated for the creations that the pop artist teams re-purpose for their business. After all, many don't have their own comfortable income that can be relied upon when they don't get compensated for another artist using their ideas in a commercial product.
Would the unpopular artists be raised to the forefront of the industry if the popular artists acknowledged their innovations and genius? I don't really think so. Even without the context of money made by artists in the industry, musical ideas have been passed down, shared, borrowed, or stolen since probably the very dawn of music. The audiences have helped to create this beast we call the music industry, hand in hand with the deep pockets of publishers, labels, and performers who release an ungodly amount of music into the world. The small artists are often not interested in being a global player, and I don't really think they have the "voice" (money) to stand toe to toe with the large players, who find themselves going to bat over yet another hit that sounds more or less like the same song.
To wrap up this very not-brief overview of some of the factors at play here, it's not an easy subject. People use copyright laws to protect their intellectual property. To prevent other people from making money off of their work. It creates a situation where any given song in the market place only has one party making money off of it. In theory, if you want to compete, you have to create something with enough differences to be not called a copycat, yet still similar enough to be competitive. The ideas being protected here are often not the physical products themselves, though, but the concepts used to convey . How fair is it for someone to copyright the use of a pattern made up of a few frequencies, laid over a pattern of another set of frequencies, played with a pattern of rhythmical concepts? A person can use entirely different timbres, different tempo, different chord voicing, different instrumentation, and different lyrics, but because you can find similar patterns in each, one may be subject to legal action. I don't know how fair it is. I don't know how fair it would be to allow that to happen, either. Neither of the songs mentioned at the beginning of this post technically could be said to contain the same melody, since the inflection, timing, tuning, and expression are slightly different. I would argue to the grave that although musical notation is a fair way to conceptualize and communicate musical content, iv, V, I, is still an abstract concept, and that any physical manifestation of this concept could come out in a billion different ways, depending on harmonic and rhythmical content, yet you would still call it iv, V, I.
What are your thoughts on plagarized music and melodies or this case with Tom Petty and Sam Smith? A lot of people here make money with their craft and have thought about this before. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Submitted February 09, 2015 at 07:55AM by CloudDrone http://ift.tt/1C8pxHi WeAreTheMusicMakers
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