Lil Nas X has like a zillion dollars worth of lawsuits coming at him all of the sudden. There’s the Bobby Caldwell “Carry On,” issue. And right now I’m going to look at a new complaint that “Rodeo” sounds too much like a track called “Broad Day” by PuertoReefa and Sakrite Duexe. It would seem …

It got heated in a hurry, but here’s why it was nonsense. In the few days immediately following the July 29th release of “Renaissance” (Beyoncé’s first album since her 2016 Grammy-winning “Lemonade”) the main story was that it contained a sample from a Kelis track and without permission. Neither of those was ever quite true. …

Taylor Swift has been fighting this particular battle for years. Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler sued Swift in 2017 because her biggest hit song of them all, “Shake It Off,” in their view infringes upon their 2001 hit, “Playas Gon Play,” recorded by 3LW. “Shake It Off,” of course includes the lines, “cuz the …

Among other things. Meta (formerly Facebook) stands accused of copyright infringement and is being sued by production music company Epidemic Sound for “damages” of 142 million dollars!!! We can talk about the ins and outs of that later. First, though, do you wonder how on earth Epidemic Sound came up with that number? Here’s an …

While watching TV last night, a few distinct thoughts struck me, and together they converged to inspire this post. My first thought, which I’d had countless times before, was the tremendous impact of the music in “Better Caul Saul.” It’s distinctive and perfect, and they sure deserve their recently announced Emmy Award nomination. (Third nomination …

Marshall Jefferson is suing Ye because Jefferson’s iconic 1986 track, “Move Your Body,” was allegedly sampled without permission on Kanye’s Donda 2’s “Flowers” and to make things potentially more complicated, Kanye’s song and therefore “Flowers” samples are distributed on a hardware device that allows remixing the stems. (The maker of the player, Alex Klein, is …

Mariah Carey is being sued by a musician named Andy Stone because he claims “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is an infringement. Stone wrote a song by the same name not long before. Musicologize has already characterized this case as “silly,” and the main reason was simply that apart from the title, there …

It’s that “Standing Outside The Fire” by Garth Brooks sounds a ton like “Conviction Of The Heart” by Kenny Loggins. And this conflict came to a supposedly “amicable” settlement many years ago. But Loggins put out a memoir recently and brought up the whole thing again and it sounds a bit less amicable. Settlements don’t …

Go big or go home, I guess? Songwriter and performer Andy Stone is suing Mariah Carey and a co-writer for $20 Million because he might actually believe “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is an infringement of his own song by the same title released a few years prior. I know, nobody wants to …

One for my lawyer friends. I’m no lawyer. My expertise is musical, not legal. But since I sometimes offer musical analysis and opinions regarding issues related to copyright, I often think about music through that lens, as pertaining to familiarity with copyright law. And it can be frustrating. So… The last time I tried to …

Headlines galore: “Ed Sheeran blasts the culture of copyright cases!” and “Ed Sheeran will video his songwriting sessions from now on!” As has become the drill, reporting on these cases is about putting the latest high-profile lawsuit du jour in context with Blurred Lines and the copyright infringement cases that have followed. And I suppose …