Ed Sheeran’s recent hit Photograph has just had a $20m lawsuit chucked at it by the writers behind the inaptly named Amazing, a song you will doubtless recall scaled the UK Top 85 back in 2012 as a single by Matt Cardle, the X Factor winner from the year everyone thinks One Direction won.
Cardle, you will also remember, wore a hat on TV to denote his artistic credibility, but X Factor credibility is different to real-world credibility, so it stands to reason that, like Cardle’s first and second singles, Amazing was entirely written by people who weren’t, and are still not, Matt Cardle. That honour falls to Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard, who are represented by (take a wild guess!) the lawyers who looked after Marvin Gaye’s family in last year’s Blurred Lines plagiarism case.
This is an open appeal to Harrington and Leonard. Chaps, you’re already on Rightmove and that’s understandable. But close the browser, because this is your chance to change music history. The fact is that opportunistic lawyers and automated song-analysis techniques are on the increase. But as the years go by, and as more songs are written using the same notes and the same instruments, it becomes increasingly unlikely that anyone will create a new, totally original song.
Very soon those two trends will intersect and at that point nobody will be able to write any more songs. Music will be over. Existing artists will grow old and die, never to be replaced. They’ll seal off the pipes at Spotify, and that Major Lazer song will be the most streamed song of all time, for all time.
So here’s the proposal. This case should be dropped, and from this point forward there should be a new plagiarism rule: if at any point one song bears a passing resemblance to another song, the best song wins all the cash. This will increase the quality of all new music. Everyone wins, except people who don’t finish their songs properly. Do we have a deal?
(Readers, please note that this principle does not also apply to journalism, or even “journalism”, so hands off.)
