CoalHeart wrote:
In Western music there are only 12 notes. There's also only a handful of chord progressions that most Westerners find appealing. How many popular songs basically boil down to I-IV-V ? Once the chord progression is defined the possible notes available for a melody are drastically limited.
Yes. But when you add meter and melody on top of chord progression, there's a pretty wide assortment of combinations and it's unlikely to "accidentally" hit upon the exact same combination. Brief moments of similarity? Sure. But we're looking at whole sections of both songs that are a virtual exact match for 20-30 seconds at a time.
Those two songs are pretty much identical. So much so that if you were familiar with Coldplay's Vida La Vida, but not with Satriani, and then heard If I Could Fly on the radio, you'd almost certainly think it was an instrumental version of Vida La Vida. To me, that's the best "test" of a musical rip-off. It's one thing to be able to recognize similar sound combinations within songs. It's another entirely when you hear one song and think it's another for a significant amount of time.
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For the past 15 years I have *earned* my living playing cover tunes. How many of the hundreds of songs I've learned are essentially the same? Most. When learning a new song a running joke among musicians is "it's basically this ( insert well known song) with a different hook and lyrics.
Yeah. But the average person listening to the two songs wont notice. The exact same chord progression, can still be played in ways that make it sound completely different. We're not talking about written notes on a piece of paper but the "sound" as heard by the consumer (the relevant audience when talking about the money side of making music, right?).
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It's the subtleties that differentiate two songs, not the basic mechanics of what notes are used. Put another way, it's not what you play, but how you play it.
Yeah. But the subtleties are pretty darn identical in the case of these two songs. Even "how it's played" is almost the same. If it was just the chords, no one would likely notice, but the vocals of Coldplay's song match exactly with the guitar melody in Satriani's. That's kinda hard to get past. Play them one after the other for a Jury and it's a lock case IMO...
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Plagiarism does occur but it must be based on the works as a whole. If the criteria is merely two songs having the same chord progression and several melody notes in common, every song written in the last 100 years would be considered a rip-off by now.
No. Plagiarism isn't based on the works as a whole. A single quote that isn't credited properly is plagiarism and is illegal. Obviously for music you do need more then short similarities, but this is well beyond that IMO. As you imply, it's not the notes and chords, but how they combine to create a "sound" that defines a song. And in this case, the combination of elements in both songs results in a "sound" that is virtually identical. Again. The test is whether someone would mistake Satriani's song for an instrumental version of Coldplay's, and I don't think that's at all unreasonable given the striking similarities between them.
In court, a professional assessment of the mechanics of music will give way to the average Joe in the Jury thinking they both sound the same every single time. I think Satriani's got a very strong case here.
