Tag: Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran Threatens to Quit Music if Found Guilty in Copyright Infringement Case

Ed Sheeran is in the midst of trial for a lawsuit that claims his song “Thinking Out Loud” rips off the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On.” His attorneys have spent the past few months unsuccessfully trying to get the case dismissed, but now, he’s raising the stakes by threatening to quit music entirely if he’s found guilty of copyright infringement.
Per New York Post, when Sheeran’s attorney asked what he’d do if the plaintiffs won the case, he responded: “If that happens, I’m done. I’m stopping… I find it really insulting to work my whole life as a singer-songwriter and diminish it.”
Sheeran has vehemently insisted that any similarities between his 2014 hit and Gaye’s 1973 song are purely coincidental, and that those similarities were too common to constitute copyright infringement. To drive his point home, he reportedly “belted out various mashups of Van Morrison songs for the courtroom on Monday” during his testimony, which probably did not help him as much as he thought it might.

I haven’t paid any attention to this case, which has been dragging on for some years now, largely because, you know, it’s Ed Sheeran; he seems to be a perfectly delightful person but his music holds no real interest for me… but when I saw him issuing this threat to quit, I thought I should perhaps see what the fuss is about. Consequently, I turned to Rick Beato:

And oh dear. Once Rick transposes the Gaye song down a half-step so that both songs are now the same key, you find it’s basically the same chord progression, same tempo and overall groove, and when he alternates the two songs one bar at a time… yikes. Not looking good for Ed, except that the latter goes to different places when it leaves that first part of the verse and melodically the two songs are completely different. I suppose the question then becomes can you prove it was deliberate (which I don’t think it was) and is it enough to merit this absurd $100m that the company managing Gaye’s co-writer’s assets (cos it’s not even Marvin’s estate this time) are asking for (which it surely isn’t)… I don’t know. Like I said, it doesn’t look great, but at the same time it’s also not the whole song; Ed’s potential problem is that this isn’t his first go-round with the copyright infringement thing, and though he did win the second one he settled on the first one, and that always looks like an admission of guilt (whether or not you are in fact guilty). Be interesting to see if he lives up to that threat if the case goes against him…

Parenthetically, something similar happened with my band, the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we had a song which I’d made, though calling it a “song” is dignifying it unnecessarily; it was called “I Believe Robert Smith is My Saviour” and it was basically a string of samples against a beat I’d come up with and the only melodic aspect of it was actually the cymbals which I’d pitched… anyway, it took years for us to solve the problem of actually putting a proper melody to it, until Joe (partner in crime, now housemate and spider wrangler) had the brilliant idea of just starting the fucking thing from scratch. The result was great but the little pattern of notes he’d come up with as the basis of the new track was almost the same as that of The Presets’ “Are You the One”… not that I expected legal issues or anything, but I suggested pitching it down and changing it slightly. Weird how I wasn’t worried about the battery of uncleared samples we had all over the album otherwise… but I don’t think there was ever much danger of us even being noticed, let alone sued over anything, anyway, given we’ve probably sold literally about a millionth of what Ed Sheeran has. There’s no money for Bob Larson to make from us…

EDIT: And he won. Looks like the Cradle of Filth collaboration will be happening after all!