Plagiarism or inspiration? The blurred lines of the music industry

31 May 2015 - 02:00 By Yolisa Mkele

Imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery. This is especially true in the music industry, where truly original sounds are rarer than hearing a foul-mouthed unicorn discuss the merits of waxing your nether regions. In the same way that much of what we see on screens is adapted from pre-existing material, modern music is often a blend of old and new inspirations.Most of the time this is perfectly all right, but, as Pharrell Williams recently discovered, there is a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. Earlier this year, Williams and Robin Thicke were ordered to pay around $7.3-million (nearly R90-million) to the estate of legendary musician Marvin Gaye after a court found that their smash hit Blurred Lines was too similar to Gaye's Got to Give It Up. (Watch the videos below and compare them for yourself.)story_article_left1The verdict sent sections of the music industry into a panic about their ability to be inspired by other music.Speaking to the Financial Times, Williams said: "The verdict handicaps any creator out there who is making something that might be inspired by something else. If we lose our freedom to be inspired, we're going to look up one day and the entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in litigation."Zac Barnett of indie rock band American Authors echoed this, saying: "Personally I think the verdict is pretty ridiculous. To think that now someone can be punished for being inspired by something is scary."Barnett and Williams have a point. Every new idea was built on the back of something that came before it. Without Madonna, Katy Perry would be just the girl in the back row of the church choir. Without Diana Ross, Beyoncé would be a middle-of-the-road singer in a sequined catsuit.But at what point does inspiration stumble into the realm of plagiarism?During the Blurred Lines trial, the bass lines from both songs were played to judge and jury and found to be so similar that, according to Entertainment Weekly, even Williams admitted: "It sounds like you're playing the same thing."South African producer and record label co-owner Das Kapital weighed in, saying: "You can reference all you want but if people hear it and say, 'Oh, there's the song that so-and-so did,' then what have you really done other than push someone else's music? Either do it [sample] legally, or don't get caught."block_quotes_start Without Diana Ross, Beyoncé would be a middle-of-the-road singer in a sequined catsuit block_quotes_endAfter the Blurred Lines verdict, which Williams and Thicke plan to appeal, many forecast an impending flood of litigation as uncredited artists crawled out of every nook and cranny to grab themselves a drumstick from the juicy turkey that is mainstream music. The reality, however, is that few of these cases ever see the light of day.At the beginning of the year, chart topper Sam Smith amicably settled his dispute with rocker Tom Petty after the latter said Smith's 2014 hit Stay With Me sounded suspiciously like I Won't Back Down, which Petty released in 1989. Smith quietly settled the case and added Petty to the song credits. Everyone from Michael Jackson to Lady Gaga via Rihanna, Beyoncé, Prince and the Rolling Stones has had a plagiarism accusation levelled at them. Which side of the debate a performer falls on undoubtedly depends, at least partially, on how much success he or she has achieved. Would the Gaye family even have noticed the plagiarism had the song been produced by a nobody and not become a runaway success?Probably not, but that is hardly the point. As much as the industry haves can cry about the death of creativity, inspiration and the like, the fact is that by plagiarising they are taking food out of people's mouths and making Scrooge McDuck money in the process.story_article_right2An example of this comes in the form of Robert Neal jnr of the funk band Faze-O. In 1977 the band released the album Riding High, which included a track by the same name. From the late 1980s on, various rap and hip-hop groups illegally sampled the song. In particular, rap group EPMD's 1989 album Unfinished Business featured a track called Please Listen to My Demo, which borrowed heavily from Riding High. The EPMD album went on to sell millions of copies and Neal and co did not receive so much as a burnished cent."It was terrible when we found out they had been sampling our stuff," said Neal, "but we have people looking out for us now and are hoping to start recovering some residuals."In the end that is why major artists always sound so disingenuous when complaining about the death of creativity. One could bet Nkandla and all its contents that if a relative unknown had a major hit with a song that sounded eerily similar to anything Williams had done, the Blurred Lines producer would have slapped them with a lawsuit faster than a Muhammad Ali combo. The narrative then would not be about the shrinking limits of inspiration, but the need to increase vigilance against rapacious intellectual-property thieves.Pharrell Williams will be performing in South Africa in September. ..

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