Did Olivia Rodrigo steal from Paramore? (analysis)

do these songs sound the same to you [Music] we recently learned that haley williams and josh rousseau songwriters of paramore's 2007 song misery business were added as co-songwriters to olivia rodrigo's 2021 song good for you what's interesting here is the kind of songwriting credit given to the songwriters of misery business it's what's called an interpolation credit which is where you take the melody of a previous song and then interpolate it into a new song giving it new context a great example of this is ariana grande's song seven rings which interpolates the melody of rogers and hammerstein's my favorite thing in the eyes of the law it's not a cover but it's also not a holy original song and the question that i have is is that is that actually what's going on did good for you interpolate the melody of misery business transposed to the key of a major both songs start on the four chord d then go to the one chord a then go to the v chord e and then go to the sixth chord f sharp minor in the case of good for you then there's a syncopated thing which goes minor to eve which i think is pretty cool too it's the same chord progression in both songs delivered with an up tempo pop punk drum groove with electric guitar instrumentation and all the trappings of commercial teenage angst good for you starts with a funky bass line that alternates between f sharp minor the six minor and e the five and you're the same chord progression although with a different groove in misery business f sharp minor the six to e both songs have a very similar harmonic scheme and how they're constructed they start in the relative minor and the verses and then progress to the major in the choruses now so what you might say you can't own a chord progression and i definitely agree with you on that one but there are some more specific things which are similar between the two songs like the melodic contour of the chorus both songs have syncopated melodies which are back phrased off of the beat and start on the third degree of the scale in this case c sharp up against the d chord the iv chord on the third measure of each chorus both melodies target the second note of the scale b and anticipate it on the e chord the fourth bar of every phrase then has a resolution to the note a the one of the key which then connects that measure to the beginning of the next measure by sliding down to the note f sharp the six in the key you hear that a to f sharp at the end of every four bar phrase in both songs so both songs target the same tones every four bars in the chorus they start on scale degree three go to scale degree two and then scale degree one in other words structurally both songs are simply three blind mice it's at least the shankarian way of looking at it picking out the target tones can give us a sense of like where our ear is drawn to in any given melody if two songs have similar accented notes in the choruses they're gonna sound similar the melodies also have a similar style of syncopation they're hitting the offbeats in a similar way and the songs share similar lyrical themes as well honestly i thought these were the same songs i prefer mystery business though seems like these songs are pretty similar right it's really not surprising why so many people drew comparisons between the two songs not just on a sonic level but on a structural level they are very similar now with all the stuff coming together and looking at these songs from the perspective of western music theory you might say yeah that they are the same song this kind of argument that you've seen so far in this video is kind of how it's done in court like with all these plagiarism lawsuits you have these forensic musicologists who are hired as expert witnesses selectively highlighting compositional elements between different songs to try and prove ownership of certain musical ideas that is a dangerous thing to do please if you're ever hired as a forensic musicologist never tell any of the lawyers about 12 bar blues then that would be a that would be a hell of a hell of a road to go down how did she not steal this from paramore it almost sounds like the same song just different words but anyway yes olivia rodrigo probably copied her homework from paramore but paramore certainly copied theirs as well the things which make the chorus of misery business sound like misery business are not unique to paramore this chord progression is the same chord progression as the so-called axis progression the four chords of pop music except starting on the iv chord instead of the one chord or the sixth chord in his paper tonal ambiguity in popular music's axis progressions mark richards calls this the f progression or the f rotation and found that fully 1.7 percent of all songs from billboard's year-end hot 100 corpus from 1990 to 2016 had this same chord progression here are just a few of them paramore doesn't actually even make the list because they were never on the year end top 100. reminder you cannot copyright chords but melodies are indeed projected okay but what about the melody similarities turns out you don't need to look very far to find other songs that share the same chord progression the same pop punk aesthetic and the same harmonic scheme of going from the relative minor in the verses to the relative major in the choruses like for example green day's boulevard of broken dreams [Music] it back phrases off the downbeat it has similar syncopation it follows a similar three two one target tone scheme basically all the formal similarities between it and good for you are there from our previous analysis the tempos are the same although they're felt differently good for you has double time drums [Music] and also billy joe is not a young teenage girl like olivia rodrigo and haley williams the compositions are very much cut from the same cloth but because different kinds of people are singing them it's harder to make that immediate connection between the two but if we overlay the two songs it sounds very similar [Music] another song that has a very similar structure is taylor swift's never getting back together [Applause] it's the same chord progression same three two one target tone scheme same syncopation shenanigans and also it like goes almost too well in a mashup with paramorous misery business [Music] [Applause] it works almost too perfectly and part of the reason for that is never getting back together has a very similar course structure as misery business check out the end of the course in this mashup [Music] it's wild right how the two songs just like seem to work with one another how does that happen why does that work well it's because they're popular songs written with similar tempos around chord loop progressions and there are only so many chord progressions and diatonic melodies which might work with those progressions certain progressions like this 4 1 5 6 minor progression have a tendency to infer certain melodies certain target tones the places that notes want to go within i give them a lot of contour and because of that realistically there are only a certain number of melodies that might be composed and musicians have always known this a big part of the musical and creative process for a very long time is taking existing ideas and then telling your own musical story through those ideas kirby ferguson talks a lot about this in everything as a remix he makes the note that bob dylan really didn't write a lot of his melodies instead he used previous melodies but just wrote new lyrics to them or reinterpreted them in different ways or as arlo guthrie would say it ain't stealing it's the folk process was bob dylan plagiarizing maybe but if he didn't do that we wouldn't have bob dylan it's a shame she does it now being caught i don't know how singers don't know when they're using someone else's music and sound ugh so there's this mashup of good for you in misery business that some people are pointing to as evidence that the songs are suspiciously similar and i think the mashup works really well but i think it's just evidence that the songs go well together because they follow a similar pop music template of which there are very few variations this is why the the taylor swift mashup works so well with misery business like olivia rodrigo was just wearing her influence on her sleeve maybe a little bit too brightly for some folks olivia rodrigo has been accused of plagiarizing before including plagiarizing rifts of elvis costello who funnily enough would respond to this by saying this is fine by me it's how rock and roll works you take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy that's what i did another atom has come to olivia's defense adam levine had this to say about this recent dustup i just hate to see it become this huge thing where people get really aggressive about it it's like i'm almost flattered when people rip me off and i'm sure i've ripped people off too i don't know in fact haley williams herself had this to say in a previous dispute about plagiarism but look this happens a lot in creative spaces we're all humans feeding off raw human emotion and we're putting them into our creative works i've seen this happen countless times with paramore where we've seen other people create things that feel similar to the things that the band created ourselves it just happens there's the aft repeated quote that is attributed to both picasso and stravinsky good artists borrow and great artist steele but what if great artists can no longer steal will there be any more great artists if ownership is treated so preciously we won't have any scaffolding on top of which to build if we are the sum of our influences and can no longer add them together what do we have left as isaac newton once said we stand on the shoulders of giants which is what he was doing when he adapted that saying from bernard to chartres there's of course nuance to this discussion here because the creative process often comes up against very real cultural inequities there's the long history of white artists taking black culture and profiting off of it at the expense of black artists which unfortunately continues to this day but that doesn't really seem to be what's going on here hayley williams and olivia rodrigo are coming from a similar cultural perspective in a cultural space and so honestly i just really don't see the problem here if you like my videos maybe uh check me out on patreon go check out the patreon only discord where you can talk more about music and music theory and thanks everybody for watching booyah [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,866,035

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: qX7a2p5_JsM

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/americanslang59]

I've posted about this before: I used to work in music. I was a tour manager for bands and was frequently around with bands during writing sessions. These weren't local bands/artists and were well known bands in the pop-punk/pop-punk scene. I've been in writing sessions with about 40+ different bands.

I can't remember a single writing session where a band DIDN'T reference ripping something from another artist.

[u/[deleted]]

I think this is setting a terrible precedent.

[u/dragonfry]

Holy shit, I remember being in a bar years ago and Sk8ter Boi gets played. A friend and I get excited and thought it was the opening bars of All the Small Things by Blink 182. We ended up singing the entirety of the Blink song to Avril’s music, and it matched perfectly.

[u/orangeucool]

Olivia's lawyers should've fought this. Sure, I see the similarities, but I don't see how it equates to a sample. A lot of pop-punk songs from that time sound the same. This doesn't seem fair at all.

[u/Acheli]

Didn't warrant paramore getting 50% and I think it's pretty cringe that Hayley went along with it.

[u/MrsVoussy]

Is it usual for an artist's album to have so many songs that sound like other people's songs? I'm not shading, I'm genuinely asking. Elvis Costello, Paramore, Taylor Swift. I'm sure it happens a lot through out careers but three of them in an 11 track debut album?

[u/rherbom2k]

Loved the mashup between Misery Business and We're never ever getting back together, and I think that proved his point very well. Let's hope that people and scummy lawyers stop accusing artists of plagiarism just to make a quick buck.

[u/vmath3us]

Music is really a beautiful science ❤️ i wasn't expecting to see a perfect Taylor and Paramore mashup.

[u/[deleted]]

Annoys me tremendously, but Olivia has a massive career ahead of her, so this doesn’t really affect much. Unfortunate that she won’t get adequately compensated for creating such a banger though