All Things Considered, December 8, 2008 - If you were near a radio or in a bar this past summer, you might have found it impossible to avoid the string-saturated "Viva La Vida" by Coldplay. Guitarist Joe Satriani heard the song, too, and it made him think about a song he wrote and performed in 2004: an instrumental called "If I Could Fly." When Satriani tried to contact Coldplay and didn't hear back after several months, he filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the band last week. To add fuel to Satriani's fire, Coldplay's CD Viva La Vida is a number-one-selling album in 36 countries and a Grammy Award nominee, while Satriani's song never made it big. <...> "It happens quite often for ... a lot of different reasons," English says. "One, there is just a large quantity of recorded music. And rock music as a genre is now well over 50 years old. The amount of originality you can have may be starting to get limited."
All Things Considered, December 8, 2008 - If you were near a radio or in a bar this past summer, you might have found it impossible to avoid the string-saturated "Viva La Vida" by Coldplay.
Guitarist Joe Satriani heard the song, too, and it made him think about a song he wrote and performed in 2004: an instrumental called "If I Could Fly." When Satriani tried to contact Coldplay and didn't hear back after several months, he filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the band last week.
To add fuel to Satriani's fire, Coldplay's CD Viva La Vida is a number-one-selling album in 36 countries and a Grammy Award nominee, while Satriani's song never made it big.
<...>
"It happens quite often for ... a lot of different reasons," English says. "One, there is just a large quantity of recorded music. And rock music as a genre is now well over 50 years old. The amount of originality you can have may be starting to get limited."
They are pretty damn close, at least based on the clips played in the story. If a musician accidentally comes up with the same melody as a copyrighted song, do they not have the right to use that melody, even if they had never the heard the song before? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Also, the riff on Satriani's If I could fly sounds like a dumbed down re-imagination of the awesome riff on Hole's Malibu.
amazing how lame the Marty Balin song sounds, and how with just a few changes the ColdPlay version becomes so much more appealing (at least to my ear).
did you see this? (you can skip to the halfway point.)
Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Yeah, I saw that clip, it's a pretty good mashup. Someone should release it as Cold Satriani, or something.
What's amazing is how lame almost everyone who was once good became in the 80s. Not just Jefferson, or Genesis. Even Bowie was kind of lame.
In fact the opposite true. Real creativity - not imitation, not remixing, not reworking, not repurposing - means having something original and personal to say, and creating some original form and style to express it.
Otherwise there would never be any musical innovation of any sort.
Also, there's a vast and unbridgeable difference between assimilating and reworking a style, and simple-mindedly copying examples of that style with only trivial changes.
I don't particularly care for Coldplay, but they seem to have taken a short melody from a chorus and reworked it to make a starting point for their verses. Stylistically it's completely different.
The rules don't prevent simple-minded ripping off of a style. Otherwise things like Republica and Meredith Brooks would never have happened. They do seem to prevent taking a melody and doing something new with it.
And that is errant nonsense. That probably falls under fair use.
Why doesn't anyone sue Weird Al Jankovich? Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
Architects often deliberately reference previous buildings in little design games that only other architects appreciate. There are more than 200 references to previous Modernist buildings in the extension to the Stockmann Department store completed over a decade ago.
If you make something personal and original that affects others, it will be associated with you. It will become part of you. Like the Jackie O pill box hat. It doesn't stop anyone else from wearing a pill box hat, but it may be understood as a reference, as a resonance.
The only reason that music copyright still exists is because the industry business model has evolved in the way it has, starting with sheet music sales for the Strausses et al. It has evolved in the way it has because once large sums of money were to be made, the lawyers moved in and screwed everyone in key. It is an industry still replete of lawyers, hoods, bouncers, thieves and con-men. It is time music was rid of them. Some of it is no better than New World Order professional wrestling.
What is needed is a new type of music business since, I think we would agree, that people will make music whatever happens, and others will gather to take part in it. Music won't disappear, even if the industry does.
I am interested to see what the new music culture will be like. There are many different approaches visible right now. Maybe all of them will be part of the new model, who knows. Maybe none. You can't be me, I'm taken
And you're still confusing references with repetition. Copying a building exactly is indeed a stupid, which is why no one does it.
Copying music closely is less stupid, which is why you can find cover bands in pubs all over the planet, and tribute bands who make a reasonable if not very interesting living reproducing familiar music for nostalgic audiences.
Those experiences certainly have a financial value, even if they're not necessarily at the creative cutting edge.
If there wer no original creative source for them to copy, that financial value wouldn't exist, which suggests there may in fact be rather more happening than a rancid and out of date attempt to copy the sheet music business model.
The Jackie O pill box hat is a silly argument, because it's a mass produced item of clothing, set in a market with a very different culture - fashion is based almost exclusively on top down imitation of celebrity for the sake of it, with no other content - and a very different business model.
No one is going to create a new music culture until people start being more realistic about what makes music valuable. Currently we have an idiotic industry on one side which believes that it's all about a product which might as well be indistinguishable from sandwiches or machine bolts as far as the execs are concerned, and equally idiotic freetards on the other who believe that copying files and using them as the background to a shaky Youtube video of someone having a painful accident makes them heroes of the imminent Open Cultural Revolution.
Neither side understands what music is, what it's for, or why paying musicians to be original might be a good idea.
Until that changes music will continue to be boring - which it surely is at the moment - and we'll entertain ourselves with exciting stories about lawsuits rather than exciting and original creativity.
But at least we agree on the terrible mess of the present music industry and, I hope, the need to change it. You can't be me, I'm taken
