As a song writer myself, I find it virtually impossible to find a melody or chord progression that sounds good and has not been done before.

Let's hope that no one ever actually manages to copyright a musical concept, because that would set back musical progress for decades.

The better question is, why do so many songs that were written using the charleston have "moonlight", "starlight", and "all night" in them.

In the College of Fine Arts in The University Of The Philippines, the first thing we were taught was that no one has a completely original idea. Everyone's creative output is somehow influenced by art that they have been exposed to.

every time there's a plagiarism I think to myself "oh boy can't wait for the adam neely video"

I can attest to how easy it is to accidentally copy a song. My band wrote a new song a little while ago and we were excited to play it live. A week before the show, I listened to an album in a similar genre and the main riff in our song was a note for note copy of one of the songs on that album. Literally no one in the band had noticed (despite it being a pretty popular album in the genre that we had all probably heard before at some point). Musical genres sound the way they do because of patterns and tropes. If enough people are writing in the same genre, it's more or less guaranteed that those patterns and tropes will eventually manifest in the same way more than once.

If you've ever gotten into a genre of music that you've never listened to before, (country, classical, etc.) And listen to a whole playlist by different artists . . . the songs all sound extremely similar, especially if you haven't heard the songs before or don't know the genre. That overall sound is what MAKES the genre, and your ears cannot differentiate because you are not yet 'trained' to hear the difference.

I've seen this happen more often lately. In most cases, the less successful artist or band are the ones suing for "infringement". With that being said, I'm certainly no musical expert, but it sounds to me like several songs use similar musical keys and notes. It's one thing to be influenced by other songs, but it's another to say someone ripped off your song because of a similar musical arrangement. Because all music is ripping off of other musical influences and sounds in some manner. There should be millions of lawsuits if the basis to sue is that one song sounds like another.

Litterally 80% of musical plagiarism controversies sound absolutely ridiculous when you actually know music theory lmao

I think we need a musicologist to explain how this Artikal Sound System song was ever on a Reggae chart

Keep in mind the Star Spangled Banner has the Charleston rhythm multiple times (in Clarinet, it’s high F, high D, high Bb in Charleston as the first notes) Honestly, people these days

The “I’m levitating” scale (F♯ E D B A) is also the same melody used as the main riff of Unity by TheFatRat (B A G E D), except that’s in swing time. They’re both the 5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st, and 7th of their respective minor keys.

Given the degree of similarity, it is highly unlikely that the Artikal Sound System "Smoke & Mirrors" album art was created independently from "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City".

This is similar to when Katy Perry got sued for "Dark Horse". I loved the song, but when I heard the "original", I was certain she plagiarized. Until I heard the 15,000 other songs that used the same beat she did. Simply put, there are only so many chord progressions and chances are good, every song is a slight modification of another song already created.

I’m still convinced that this video single-handedly helped Dua Lipa win her case, Adam supporting artists whilst also entertaining us, king sh*t!

This is why song writers must record every writing session be it voice recorder or video. Awesome analysis & channel dude.

Theres not enough music notes in the world for EVERY song to be unique. EDIT: Apparently some People don’t understand what I mean. After YEARS there will not be enough music notes to create a song that doesn’t sound like another song. SECOND EDIT: It’s so funny to me that people are still fighting over this, I honestly just come back to read these replies because this shit has me laughing my ass off

from an improvisation standpoint i actually believe the story they told in the podcast, you could compose levitating without conciously plagiarizing any of the other songs. They took a common chord progression and rythmic pattern in the genre they were aiming for and they played a little with it. It is a huge coincidence, but it's possible

Excellent video. Thanks for your insight and expertise!

“There is always Prior Art” agree.. and i believe that past art inspires the new ones. And thats what makes Music Beautiful! ❤

Dua's album is called "Future Nostalgia" because it deliberately utilizes common motifs from earlier popular music (causing nostalgia) while combining it with modern music trends (from the future)...

When I was studying sound and music tech in college and I had to study copyright infringement cases in music business (already having a bit of background of music theory beforehand) I couldn't help but be furious at watching lawyers grasp at straws to try to manipulate people in the courtroom. This is no different. Thank you for breaking it down in a way that's easily understandable.

Hey that was a great analysis on the lawsuit, really broke it down for me! Thanks man!

The two painting/rectangle pieces on the wall behind you are skewed and triggering my OCD. Almost felt like my head is spinning. :) Fascinating to hear how you analyze music and how deep the research goes into it.

Adam just looks so, so, **so** tired of having to do this again.

How on earth an incredibly simple chord progression can be "owned" by someone never ceases to amaze me. Maybe we should go into details like how they used a Roy Ayers vocal riff?

Loved this video ... great effort I can only imagine ... I learned so much

Excellent breakdown! Outkast respect!!

What's fascinating about this is that people are still claiming copyright infringement for the most basic chord progressions and melodies as if they invented them, yes, it's 2020 and you're the first, brilliant, brilliant musician who thought about this sound and melody! Nobody else has ever heard of it before you came along, it took millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of music and countless artists to get to you, you wizard of notes and chords, to hook these 4 bars and improvise this, oh my god indeed, bravo.

It's interesting that 2 bands can have almost the same song but one blows up and the other is almost unknown. Really shows you how much image and marketing matters for your success

Dude, this is an awesome analysis! Nice work

THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING YAAAAAS. Totally what I'm interested in!! I'm soaking in this knowledge!!

How lucky are we to be alive in a time when this kind of thoughtful, reasoned exploration of topics with broad influence is available to anyone and everyone? Outstanding work, as always, sir.

can you imagine if EDM artists were suing each other for their bassdrops sounding too similiar? It would be absolute madness. All music we make builds off of the past, and even barring that, let's not pretend like the themes and melodies for the hook are not absurdly simplistic. Literally any musician could come up with that... and seeing as there are hundreds of thousands of musicians in the world... it is crazy NOT to think that this is bound to happen. Artikal sound system has basically no fanbase on a large scale and are essentially nobodies. That's not to flame them, it's fine, but to think that anyone of status heard their music, let alone copied it, is beyond delusional.

Wow, amazing and really informative breakdown of this case. I was baffled how this was NOT a copyright infringement but hadn't even thought about the similarities to Rosa Parks (how did I not hear that from the beginning?!). Thanks for deepening my music knowledge!

Just noticed this when comparing "Arjen's Bag" by John McLaughlin, "Follow Your Heart" by Joe Farrell (which is credited to and includes McLaughlin) and "Day's Eye" by Soft Machine (which does neither). So, this isn't new, and "there's always prior art" is a great way to describe it.

Great take. The only thing I still don’t understand is how that generic pop-dance song could be called “Reggae” in any universe.

If I were them, I'd drop the lawsuit, make a mashup on their live shows and release an actual hit. They have like 2 weeks TOPS of people's attention, otherwise they are gonna fade into obscurity with nothing but a countersuit lol

Thank you for your work. 👍

Thank you for digging deeper into things. Usually ot works this way: fans are gonna support, haters will use the opportunity to hate. Settled

people seem to forget that there are literally millions and millions of song around the world. this arrangement and beat could've been used way before to a non english song.

60k songs per day. Of course there's gonna be similarities. But these lawsuits are baseless

Good explanation and learned something about song-writing too - you have my abo!

Wow - this was very interesting and well-done. Excellent!

The entire point of Future Nostalgia was, well, nostalgia. It drew on electro disco and dance music going all the way back to the 1970s and earlier. This meant lots of quotes of overall feel, explicitly, throughout the entire album. But I think this kind of suit is often some opportunistic scavenging, and this one certainly looks that way.

CORRECTIONS/ADDITIONS: 1. It is very difficult to find concrete information about the song Live Your Life prior to the date the lawsuit was filed, and there is a popular Tik Tok conspiracy going around that Live Your Life is a hoax, and didn't actually come out in 2017, and instead was created specifically after the fact to sue Dua Lipa. That's...probably no true - the song probably WAS on spotify at one point, here is the link. open.spotify.com/album/70G0t4AnDAFPs23TZJgIMY?fbclid=IwAR04--wx8lrWMT2vjaNAypdSUq4lNrP2ZH6LQ0vXHSP_dW6jX5slIouaz3g. We can't hear the song Live Your Life, but there was A song called Live Your Life uploaded in 2017 as part of this EP, but it was removed at some point. The band at one point had a different singer, the Jamaican singer Monsoon Bedward, but all songs the band did with Monsoon have been removed from streaming services for reasons that are unclear. Monsoon, née Denton, is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit alongside the other current members of the band. 2. Some people I'm sure will point out that Outkast's Rosa Parks is in a different key/harmonized differently than Levitating. This brings up 2 epistemic questions - is a song still a song if it is in a different key, or harmonized differently? Well (in the West anyway), yes! Mary Had a Little Lamb is still Mary Had a Little Lamb in the key of C, as well as Ab. It's still Mary Had a Little Lamb regardless of what chords are used in its harmony. So why would it be any different with Rosa Parks? Rosa Parks in still Rosa Parks in the key of G#m, as well as Bm, and it doesn't matter what chords go with Rosa Parks, it's still the same song.

Thanks for coming to the point(s) without talking and talking for hours. I Like that style

Great video ❤. Can you do one on The Rolling Stones lawsuit against The Verve?

Just for the record, you do not need to be a lawyer to argue points like this in court. Expert Witnesses can be anyone with more knowledge in the subject than the average person, and are the only ones allowed to give opinions, and I think Adam Neely would qualify. I wish the defense in cases like this would bring in people like Adam as expert witnesses, honestly. Because every case that ends not in the defense's favor sets a precedent for future cases to do the same, and strengthens copyright restrictions on music.

Could be subconscious plagiarism, I know from experience sometimes when you come up with a song you just have it in your head and don’t actually know if it’s from an existing song or something that came up to you. Usually when that happens and you work it out it wont end up completely the same though

What I noticed is that no one mentioned here in this video is that there was a song written even further back that sounds exactly like this one. I can't recall the woman's name singing the song but she was somewhat a known artist and she sang the song in the same style. I believe the song writer was L. Russell Brown who is known for writing such hit songs as "Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole' oak tree" and "Knock Three times" and many many other hit songs for numerous artist including the likes of Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons "Come on Marianne" also "Sock it to Me" by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Anyway Brown I believe wrote a song that is eerily similar to this song. I believe that Brown may have even pursued a law suit himself with this tune. I'm not one hundred percent sure but I recall hearing about this in another video. If anyone looks this info up can you please comment your findings here to let us know? Thank you .

Thanks for explaining this so well.

also, the 2017 version's claim is suspicious because you can't find it anywhere except on soundcloud, where you can change the sound of a song while keeping the date anyway. I think I saw that on soundcloud

Songs that are meant to get people dancing probably are going to have "all night" "feel alright" "live life" "all the time" Something that encapsulates a good feeling forever, not "I hate the world" "I'm so sad my heart could burst" and "everything is wrong in the world"

Very interesting video. Far more to it than just listening to the songs side by side

Finally, I was instantly attracted to the Dua Lipa song, and watching this video, I realized it's because of that final bar ('I'm levitating'). It seems reasonable to me to think that's the twist that made it make more money than the 'common', less inspired bar in the (claimed) 'original'.

Question for all the songwriters here: when you make a song olr melody, how do you know you're not repeating something you've heard before? Like, when I was young and decided, I wanna write a song (before knowing how to play any instrument lol), I picked up a guitar and made a very simple melody. Proudly, I played it to my brother ... and then he showed me that I'd copied the main menu melody from the first Tomb Raider game. I'd never even played the game, but I must've picked up that melody somehow, and I had no clue I was copying it. Does that happen to proper musicians too? Or do real musicians have some kind of musical memory and this type of unintentional copying doesn't happen?

Imagine if we had copyright claims like this in every kind of art. Like you draw a oil painting portrait of a girl and get sued by every artist who ever touched a paint brush for clearly ripping off their style. You make a sitcom and get sued by every single other sitcom in existence for clearly ripping off the same story beats and characters. Its just dumb and kinda shows how legally insane music companies have went in recent years

This is fascinating- I’ve just shared it with my eighteen year old son. He’s studying maths/loves music. He’ll find this interesting. Thank you.

thanks for the video it was really helpfull to remember even though I could find by myself)

"It may have once been available that way but it isn't any longer" sounds like someone didn't renew their DistroKid membership (as they probably made less money from streaming royalties than the DistroKid membership costs)

I just had a feeling that the similarity was more chord progression and rhythm based than an actual explicit melody copy. You explained it wonderfully.

@Adam Neely....Dude, I just fell out of my chair LMAO when you mention OutKast! Real talk, this case should be thrown out of court at this point.

What an absolute Banger of a video. You literally broke it down to where any lawyer could understand it. Great job.

This is a really good analysis. It's extremely easy to go "hey, A totally plagiarized B! here, listen to the two together, they're basically the same" - which ignores all other context. I'd love to see one of the artists in "The 4 chord song" try to sue every other artist that came after them and made a four-chord song with the same progression. Also "they sound the same" is an extremely vague concept, which can mean anything from "literal sampling of everything" to "a background melody is kinda similar but everything else isn't". Good job for highlighting both of these issues!

Just talked about this too and came to the same conclusions. Since the very first moment I heard about the lawsuit I was "no way, such common.. everything 😄" . Good video man 👍

Love your analysis…😊

When you said “OutKast’s 1988 song Rosa Parks” I had to rewind it to make sure I heard that right lol.

Dua Lipa’s whole album samples songs from the 70s all the way through the 90s. So yeah her songs sound similar to a lot of songs. And honestly, that reggae band’s song sounds like a cover from a 70s song that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Man…I’m glad I saw this. I watched Beato’s video on this yesterday and came away thinking it was an open and shut copy-write case with Dua Lipa clearly being guilty. Even as a huge Outkast fan I did not think about Rosa Parks nor did I even consider whether or not the melody and progression in question had been done before prior to the 2017 track. Thanks for the perspective and the reminder to not take everything at face value.

I used to try really hard to create only original beats and melodies and whatever. Now, I just try to follow the feeling and be as true to that as possible with the belief that we're all just tapping into the same thing anyway. So it's not so much about being original as tapping into that Original Source as purely and deeply as possible. Do that and nothing else matters. Anyway, great video as usual!

Great analysis 👍

This stuff is going to happen more often and often as time goes on. They might as well just get around to saying no more new music is allowed to be made as all the possible sounds have been made and copyrighted.

Music being the kind of derivative art form that it is, it's difficult to ever conclusively prove that any one artist originated a particular style, melody, or lyric. I think the larger question really is: What is the purpose of intellectual property law as it applies to music? How can we protect the hard work put into existing songs without making illegal half the process of music-making? We need more diversity both in culture and professions in this emerging field of legal philosophy to get to a more satisfactory understanding than we currently have.

Worst thing is, I discovered Artikal Sound System because I love Dua Lipa and there is a lawsuit about it...and I find their music is pretty dope XD All that to say, I'll go back to listening some Outkast...

Great video as usual

Great analysis, totally refreshing to hear a compelling and valid argument for this kinda stuff :)

I saw someone mention that you can completely replace audio files on Soundcloud without it changing the date shown, so the fact that the only other recordings are from after Levitating kinda makes this whole thing even fishier.

Oh shit…what an analysis!!! Mind blowing.

I have learnt so much in 10 mins, thank you!

Dua Lipa: I'm levitating. Artikal: We're litigating.

Love the part of all 3 bands harmonizing in the same key together HAHAHA

This is a fantastic analysis.

This video literally proves how a good lawyer with good facts can easily sway the jury in ANY direction. Some would take one skim through both songs and drop/reject the case altogether.

If I ever get sued for ripping off another song, I’m calling Adam Neely to the stand 😂

Heck, even I have accidentally copied a song and I'm not a professional musician / songwriter. It is rather bizarre feeling though. I once wrote a riff - which to be honest wasn't even any good - just to hear a song with the exactly same riff playing on my father's Spotify playlist half a year later.

This video was great - kudoosss

From what I understand from my songwriting days is that one change makes it unique. Period.

As someone from the UK around the same age as Dua Lipa, it is entirely plausible for her to subconsciously think of "kiss kiss". The Holly Valance remake was very big when we were kids and it's a classic of the 2000's pop era.

I am going to show this video to my wife! I told her levitating sounded JUST like Cake by the ocean, but I couldn't put into words exactly how.

In "We're Good" is the Guitarlick from INXS "Need You Tonight"

Every time I hear Levitating it instantly reminds me of Rosa Parks by Outkast and Cake by the ocean. I knew it. 😊

4:08 what my fever dream/sleep paralysis demon sounds like

i remember coming up with a cool melody while i was cycling. i was really excited and immediately recorded it with my phone to not forget it. few days later i listened to green day and realized i just accidentally took their melody. this happens really easily.

Wild to think that similar chord progressions and beat tempos could be used throughout the years….could you imagine if copyright was a thing in the classical era?

So glad KZfaq recommended this video. This is such an high priority topic.

you have a scary ability to completely change my mind about things like this in under ten minutes. you should definitely try and offer yourself up as a expert in court cases like this

So whenever I hear Levitating, the melody always creeps towards another song that I can never remember. But I just did: it’s Staying Alive by the BeeGees! The chorus/pre-chorus bit. So yeah, more examples of how it’s not exactly the most unique sounding melody I guess.

Amazing video, first time seeing one of yours. As a musician this is a very well done analysis

Excellent vídeo!!! 🎉