Why the Ed Sheeran lawsuit makes no sense

so edge yarns being sued for the similarities between his song thinking out loud and Marvin Gaye's let's get it on they do sound similar for one specific reason as the lawsuit explains the prominence of the bass line and the drum composition throughout let's get it on make the compositional elements qualitatively unique copyrightable and important to the musical work as a whole this really can't be denied the two songs have the same bass line the same drum groove the same tempo they sound similar you can go check out Rick P Otto's video on the subject where he plays the two of them side by side so you can hear for yourself now the lawsuit goes on to claim that no other identified song in history prior to let's get it on includes a one three four five or a one one six four five progression at the same tempo of 80 beats per minute except you know [Music] but that's like ancient history though that doesn't fall under copyright protection is there anything in the modern era well the 100 million dollar lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Edie Townsend the co-songwriter of let's get it on Edie Townsend is most famous as a performing artist for his minor 1958 hit for your love if you listen to for your love's chord progression its triplet piano riff it's drum groove its tempo ed Townsend clearly stole all of those elements from 1954 s doo-wop hit earth angel by the Penguins which has all of the same element [Music] why a reasonable person would just chalk it up to stylistic similarity for your love is a derivative work but it's a different song it has a different melody I'm not a legal expert so I can't comment on how any of this relates to the law but from a musical and historical perspective the practice of copying bass lines from earlier work to create new compositions is the very foundation of how Western music was written how it was taught how it was developed for the past several hundred years in fact the practice of Cantus firmus using a pre-existing melody as a baseline for a new work has existed for at least a thousand years in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it became common for composers to write paraphrase masses for the church using popular secular tunes as bass lines or inner voices when writing different music around it all of the Masters from this era from yem Dufay to justin they pray to Palestrina wrote many of these paraphrase masses to reach great musical and aesthetic heights [Music] now eventually this practice became so codified as a foundational element in composition that borrowing other melodies through Cantus firmus became a default pedagogical tool culminating in johan fox's treatise gratis add par nasa a textbook we still use today now jumping forward to the 20th century jazz musicians have frequently relied upon the practice of contra fact or using one song's chord progression to write another melody the courts of George Gershwin's I've got rhythm have been duplicated many times with many different melodies that the same basic 32 bar structure known as rhythm changes using the Selassie logic George Gershwin's estate should get all the royalties from the Flinstones theme [Music] if we take a historical view the baseline of let's get it on is the Cantus firmus of thinking out loud thinking out loud is a contra fact of let's get it on same progression but different melody isn't that a bit of a stretch we're not talking about masses here we're talking about pop songs can you even make the comparison well that's true but music is music and there's actually a little bit more difference between the two songs than what I initially implied ed Sheeran song has a slightly different structure with a different pre-chorus and a different post chorus and it's also important to mention that although the bass lines are the same the chords are actually slightly different between the two songs thinking out loud 2nd chord is a d / f-sharp a 1 chord with a 3rd mid-space rendered in classical notation as 1/6 but this chord in the sequence of let's get it on is f-sharp minor the Triad built on the 3rd degree of the scale or the 3 minor chord this is no matter the lawsuit claims as any freshman harmony textbook will attest the 1 chord with the 3rd scale degree in the bass may stand in or substitute for the 3 chord without affecting the function of the progression that's a fairly bold statement the most popular freshman harmony textbook right now in America is the tonal harmony by Kosta pane and there's no discussion of functional harmony whatsoever in that book ok so I've heard you use that term functional harmony before what exactly is that and why is it relevant here function refers to how a chord behaves in a sequence you can loosely think of it like grammatical structures like nouns and adjectives the one chord has tonic function it feels like home it's at rest the forecourt has sub dominant or predominant function it feels like there's some motion away from home the five chord has dominant function it asks to be resolved back home to the tonic what about the one six of the three minor chords what are their functions well let's ask a dead German Arnold Schoenberg writing in this 1911 treatise theory of harmony says that for if the bass tone is e for example but E is the lowest tone of the sixth chord then this e of the bass is completely irrelevant to the character of the connection this chord will make with the next it is rather the see the route by which the force and the significance of the harmonic progression is measured so one six has the same tonic function as one and D over f-sharp is a synonym of D but what function does three minor have let's ask another dead German Hugo Ryman in his influential text harmony simplified which as a title is a bit of a misnomer talks about parallel clong which is a concept in functional harmony where in the substitution of the major sixth for the perfect fifth above in the major triad results in the relative of a given triad if we do this with a D tonic one chord we substitute the fifth with a sixth and get a minor the six minor or the relative tonic also known as the relative minor incidentally if we do the same with a the five chord in the key of D we get an F sharp minor the three minor chord or what rhymin would call the relative dominant so we have here two different functions one six is a tonic and three minor is a relative dominant [Music] you can think of it this way the words read read read and read all sound fairly similar but mean quite different things depending on the context okay I kind of get your point but that second chord on thinking out loud and let's get it on really does sound exactly the same to me why might that be now f-sharp minor does share to comment owns with D the tonic but it also shares two common tones with a the dominant a common term for the three minor chord is the mediant because it's halfway in between the dominant and the tonic now there are other interpretations of this chord and its function Stephen Lai it's writing in the complete musician says that three minor may substitute for one six to create a tonic extension just as six minor may substitute for tonic this interpretation might seem to vindicate the lawsuit three minor and one six have the same function therefore the chord progressions are the same therefore ed Sheeran owes a hundred million dollars and I don't know maybe that passes as a legal analysis but as a musical analysis that is casting a shockingly wide net it's like the plaintiffs aren't just claiming a chord progression as their own they're claiming the pattern behind it they're claiming the very idea of a tonic chord followed by a substitute tonic chord followed by a predominant and then a dominant that's like laying claim to an adjective followed by a noun followed by a verb is the functional pattern the composition itself can you own that if that's the case then the chords to thinking out loud and let's get it on have the same functional analysis as earth angel the same song that Edie Townsend ripped off before he co-wrote let's get it on earth angels second chord is six minor in both Hugo Ryman and Stephen Lyons agree that it has a substitute tonic function using the law suits own logic it's not ed Sheeran that's guilty of copyright infringement said Townsend we've been talking about the thread that's similar between these two songs the bass line and its harmonization but historically speaking songs have been cited for copyright infringement not because of that but because of melodic connections but thinking out loud and let's get it on don't have any they have very different melodies despite this the lawsuit spends several pages throwing as much jargon at you to try and convince you that they are in fact the same melody when you can clearly hear that they aren't and haha honestly it's kind of sad I don't even want to bother trying to debunk it but you can read it the lawsuit is public record it is in the description I encourage you guys to read the lawsuit yourselves so that you can imagine that you're a juror sitting in a courtroom listening to the similarities between the two songs with this corpus of the impressive sounding music theory to confirm your suspicions what will you think what's dangerous here is that the jury that will be deciding this 100 million dollar case likely won't have much music theory education to speak of and so whichever side throws the most jargon might be likely to win all of music to some degree or another is iterative and if a jury can be convinced that in this case it's a bad thing that the law was broken then certain actors will have used the legal system to enrich themselves and not the musical tradition [Music] please

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 3,585,488

Keywords: Ed Sheeran, Marvin Gaye, let's get it on, lawsuit, copyright, copyright infringement, song, adam neely, adam neely jazz, music theory

Id: Tpi4d3YM79Q

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 09 2018