From The Third Ireland Diary
Day 39
Wednesday April 6, 2022
Mark:
Huge relief today as a result comes in we’ve been eagerly awaiting and dreading at the same time. Ed Sheeran wins his courtcase which he’s been fighting alongside his songwriting partners Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid.
If this means nothing to you, just let me say first, that this is huge, just huge for us. There have been a lot of concerning plagiarism cases recently, or at least it’s felt as though it’s proliferated recently and in a way, I actually kind of get it. Bear with me. I’ll come to that. But while there may be some genuine grievances in plagiarism cases, so many of the ones flying about around the current time are purely spurious and nothing more than shakedowns. People with no chance of doing anything for themselves trying to legally steal from those who’ve actually gone out and made it. It basically boils down to, I once used words, that songwriter is using words and made them into a big money making hit. Therefore he or she owes me money. I’m not even exaggerating that much. The Ed Sheeran case felt like a bit of a landmark moment. If he won, maybe this could set something of a precedent and signal the end of these kinds of pathetic, money grabbing, empty spurious claims. But if he lost. Oh man. If he lost. We really don’t want to think about it. It could have been the end of songwriting as we know it. As Ed said himself summing up the experience afterwards, 60’000 songs go up on one particular streaming service every day. I had to go back and check that. Yes. Every day. Which makes 22 million a year. And that’s just on one service. And all of these songs use the same 12 notes. If you’re reading all this Diary because you love your music but have no idea about how to go about making it or how it’s made, yes, there are just 12 notes available to us. That’s if you don’t count the notes in between that we generally don’t have but which are used in some eastern forms of music and I’m not counting them. Those 12 notes. A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G and G#. Yep. Taking away the eastern stuff which can sound a bit strange to us, going back centuries, or even millenia, every song, music score, piece of classical music and every single song on every single Beatles album, uses just these 12 notes and nothing more. Because there is nothing more. Again, as Ed said, coincidences are bound to happen. And yes, there is some imitation, homage and reference. But downright copying? Not as often as you might think. I mean, consider it. Really consider it. I write a song about my wonderful, magic football which I love very much. Try, if you can, to imagine the wonderfully unique melody that only I could possibly have come up with. ‘Maybe you’re gonna be the one that plays me/ Don’t call Saul/ You’re my wonderball.’ Now seriously, do you really think I’d be calling my friends to come round and hear my amazing new song and think they wouldn’t pick up on it? No. Outright copying, for the very most part, just does not happen. Songwriters are creators who want to create. Not copy something else and pretend it’s theirs. Alright, there are some bad actors out there, but for the most part, the people doing the bad acting are the ones accusing others of doing it and then trying to nick all their money.
Now we come to this. If Ed had lost, there’s no two ways about it. It would have been open season on songwriters and as close as dammit to finishing up our chances before we even got out of the gatefold. Anyone who ever had a hit ever, from this day on, would have had it stolen from them the second it got the tills ringing. Basically, the industry into which myself and Maja have set sail and are attempting to steam dead ahead into would have been all but destroyed. I don’t think it would have stopped us doing what we’re doing but I think we would have been living in state of denial that it was even a thing anymore to actually have a go at making something in there without having it stolen from you the second it actually became something. Believe me. The long long wait of a week or so from the conclusion of ‘evidence’ in this case to the actual judgement coming down was agonising.
I did say that I did get it didn’t I? Well this is that bit. We’ve said before that it’s never been easy to make it in music at any level and in any discipline. But to try to get anywhere now as an original act, I don’t think it’s ever been harder. So for those trying but never getting anywhere and not seeing how they can get anywhere. What can they do to shorten their odds of at least getting something out of this game? Try to take it from those who have it. Yeah, record companies have been doing that to artists forever, but now artists are doing it to each other. And so often, it’s done in the hope that the person being pursued just decides it’s not worth the hassle of defending and just settles out of court so that they can get on with their current album writing/recording, touring, or whatever else it is they’d rather be doing. In a lot of these cases it’s really nothing less than a good old fashioned shakedown, and I can’t help but think a lot of the ‘artists’ are put up to it by the music industry’s own take on ambulance chasing lawyers. No win, no fee. Hello. I’m calling about some chords you recently used. Is that right. Did you recently use chords? Er, yes. Great. I’ve just heard that someone else did. For no money up front, and just a split of the robbery, er, rights, I’ll get them to admit they used the same chords as you and give us the royalties. Great. Thanks. One further question. When you did these chords, did you also use words? Er, yeah. Wonderful. Open and shut case. We file tomorrow, and by the day after that, every songwriter in the world will wish they never bothered writing any songs in the first place. Because, well, if anyone with a pen and a musical instrument can ‘prove’ they didn’t actually write them without copying and can now take all their money, what’s the point anymore?
And that, my friends, is what Ed Sheeran, Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid have just saved us all from.
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