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Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

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Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#81

Post by jboxee »

cJ0th wrote: post #69
delinka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...releasing a cover without permission...is not ok." I have to disagree with this. And it's already allowed with Compulsory Licensing. The writer of the song gets their cut as specified in the law. As to the rest of your comment, I don't think you mean "broad protection." Broad protection is exactly what allows 'silly' lawsuits. Something that's "too similar" gets into trouble because the protection for the origina…

Sorry, I was a bit unclear as English is not my mother tongue. I thus expressed my thoughts not correctly/clumsy. "cover without permission": I meant to say stealing everything from a song (text+music) 100% while claiming it is your own. "broad protection": apparently not the correct word. I meant to say, the law should be less strict. > Now, making a transformative work based on others is where I feel things get int…

I think this is why remixes exist. For me, I often find the interpretations of others' works sometimes more interesting than the original - this is within music as well as other fields like art in the form of painting/drawing.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#82

Post by privacypoller »

billsix wrote: post #27

I have "written" guitar riffs that I later found out were from a song I hadn't heard in 5+ years. I had honestly thought that I wrote it.

from a copyright perspective intent doesn't factor into it - check out the judgement against George Harrison for “subconscious plagiarism” in the "My Sweet Lord" copyright case.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#83

Post by shmageggy »

ebbv wrote: post #9
jimnotgym wrote: post #7

For anyone who doesn't play the guitar, 'Creep' and the Hollies track is is derived from come feature a rather obvious chord progression. Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhe…

Chord progressions aren’t copyright-able. So no, that obvious thing isn’t. What is subject to copyright is the melody. That’s what they got the claim on. The vocal melody.

It probably didn't help that the drum groove is identical as well.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#84

Post by privacypoller »

The interesting part of this is not actually the copyright infringement, but the aggressive use by the Del Rey camp as a marketing opportunity. Her song is a deep cut that was never a single and apparently Radiohead is trying to settle out of court, yet she's actively pushing the narrative of a "100% claim lawsuit" and how they're making her life a "living hell". Coupled with the deliberate manufactured image of Lana Del Rey and the resulting exposure I can't believe this in not an intentional ploy that's driving huge exposure to both her and this substandard, at best derivative, song.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#85

Post by Justsignedup »

This also underlines the rediculousness of how long copyright is. Seriously, around what ~130 years?

Things inspire people, people copy, there isn't an infinite amount of good ideas.

Frankly creep is old enough that I'd argue it should be copyable. Just like other ideas. But alas the Mickey Mouse laws are really hindering progress IMO.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#86

Post by mbrameld »

billsix wrote: post #47
jimnotgym wrote: post #7

For anyone who doesn't play the guitar, 'Creep' and the Hollies track is is derived from come feature a rather obvious chord progression. Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhe…

> Physically it is the result of sliding an open E chord down the neck to produce higher notes then, la piece de resistance, taking a finger off. Radiohead added a killer feature of turning the gain up on the amplifier for the chorus, genius. It's the kind of thing teenagers everywhere find in their second month of guitar mastery. E major, G# major, A major, A minor The song is in E major, yet G# major and A minor ar…

It doesn't matter that they're not musically in the same key. It's their physical position on the fretboard that is being compared to the physical position of the white keys on the piano

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#88

Post by IAmGraydon »

I read this article and have to admit that I instantly sided with Radiohead because I have a natural bias toward them and against Lana. I'm just not a fan of her music. Then I listened to her track. I'm very familiar with the Radiohead track. Radiohead is just plain wrong on this one.

Here's the problem - your average jury/judge/lawyer does not have the required music theory knowledge to understand how asinine Radiohead's case is. There is a short list of 3-, 4- and 5-chord harmonic progressions that literally 90% of popular music is based on. What makes these songs different is the overlying melody and (to a lesser degree) the rhythm. Because these progressions are so commonly used, your mind doesn't automatically go "this song sounds like that song" because they all somewhat sound like each other (in a harmonic sense) and none really sticks out. We focus instead on the melody and rhythm.

Now in the case of this Lana Del Rey song, she is using a far more rare chord progression in the verse where the last chord in the progression moves from a major chord to the minor of the same chord instead of resolving to the tonic. It creates the sense of dark tension in the song. Radiohead also uses this technique in Creep. Lana has really done nothing different from all the other pop musicians who use the same harmonic progressions as each other, but in this case there are very few songs to compare it to since it's a very non-standard progression. So when you hear this next to Creep, your brain goes "wow they do sound very similar". The melody of the vocals in the verse seems to carry some similarity to Creep as well, but it's really a pretty natural melodic line to sing over that progression due to how strong the color of the harmonic sequence is. Most importantly, the chorus shares nothing in common with the chorus of Creep.

In court, Radiohead will likely win because the general population just does not understand this in-depth. They haven't written music and therefore don't get how easily one song can sound like another with absolutely no plagiarism intended. The sad thing, to me, is that Radiohead DOES understand this and they are still choosing to go ahead with the lawsuit against another creative artist. I guess that's what happens when you still need to make money and your career effectively ended decades ago.

Re: Lana Del Rey, Radiohead, and the Difficulty of Making Original Music

#89

Post by ozim »

the_gipsy wrote: post #36

It id absurd to copyright a melody IMO. Consider flamenco. It has about 10 base styles each with a specific scale, melody (yes you are reading right!), beat, and structure. Then there are a variety of variations, that perhaps change the structure or mix in another melody. Between the base melody parts, there are falsetas which are unique melodies. These are also shared between guitarists. Some are considered popular…

I can imagine that some street flamenco artists were fighting over that others were copycats. Probably you won't know about this because it is not international drama and money involved are quite small.
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