As most of us on here are of a certain age group I'm sure we can all think of quite a few songs that appear very similar to each other but the current escalation in suing people is getting daft now. I totally believe that the original artists should get credit if someone else has directly sampled or lifted their work or sections of it. For example, Madonna had to do a bit of fighting to get Benny & Bjorn to agree to her sampling "Gimme gimme " on "Hung up", Portugal the man could hardly not acknowledge their debt to "Please Mr Postman" and Sting got royalties for that riff sampled by Puff Daddy (much to the annoyance of Andy Summers who actually wrote it!). But some of the recent law suits are a bit farcical.

As the famed "Axis of awesome" you tube clip shows, so many pop songs use the same chord progressions just in maybe different keys or tempo and with a limited number of musical notes it's hardly a surprise. Certain genres -e.g. Blues-particularly recycle the same progressions. Because of this, my understanding is that you cannot claim ownership of a chord progression.

When you compare Sheeran's "Thinking out loud" to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it on", (the latter far better than the former IMHO) the similarities are obvious-even to the extent that Sheeran himself has done a mash up of the two-but whilst the chord progression in the verse is almost identical the melody is decidedly not. Admittedly, the "groove" of the verse (tempo/bass/drums ) is near identical but then lots of genres use the same styles (e.g. Country/reggae/soul etc) -it's what helps identify them as being part of that genre!

As long as the melody is different I think that to pursue such cases is the start of a slippery slope and more about greed than anything else. I do get that writers will often deliberately sneak in elements of existing successful popular songs into new ones because that familiarity helps acceptance but surely no music is entirely original and not influenced by what came before to varying degrees.

I know we're going to be focussed on tonight's game today but anyone else have an opinion on this?