The men they call when two tunes sound alike
LONDON — Peter Oxendale, a onetime glam rocker (“We all have skeletons,” he says), is perhaps the world’s leading forensic musicologist, the person musicians call when they believe someone has ripped off their work. In a penthouse overlooking the English Channel, he analyzes songs, everything from pop hits to classical pieces, until he is sure there has been an infringement, or not.
So it’s a shame he clammed up recently when asked about today’s highestprofile copyright question: Did British pop star Ed Sheeran steal from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” for his own “Thinking Out Loud”?
Asked his opinion of the case, which is now the matter of a lawsuit in New York, Oxendale pretended to zip his mouth. Did that mean he had a client on either side?
Oxendale’s reticence to discuss ongoing cases — he won’t even show journalists his office in case they stumble across notes — is evidence of one truth about the world of music copyright: There can be a lot of money involved.
Last year, a jury awarded Gaye’s family $7.3 million after deciding that Robin Thicke’s hit “Blurred Lines” copied one of his songs. Oxendale was involved in the case, though he wouldn’t say how, and said the verdict was appalling.
“Those songs only share a groove,” he said. “A jury can say the sky is green, but that doesn’t mean it is.” He expects it to be overturned on appeal.
Oxendale got into the profession by accident.
One day, he visited a publishing company to sell them some songs when its head of legal affairs spotted him.
“He said, ‘Oxendale, you’ve got a music degree, haven’t you? Can you do me a report?’ And I was absolutely skint so said ‘yes.’ I wrote seven pages in longhand. I didn’t know anything about copyright. It must have been absolute garbage.”
In the 35 years since, Oxendale, 64, has built his knowledge largely by “getting beaten up by barristers and judges” in cases involving everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Bjork.
He’s even been asked to use his skills outside copyright, once representing a suspected getaway driver in a murder trial. British police had charged the man with conspiracy to murder, partly because he managed a rap group whose songs were filled with violence. Oxendale was hired to prove there were similar lyrics in countless rap songs.
Many forensic musicologists seem to have stumbled into the profession.
Guy Protheroe is musical director of the English Chamber Choir, a leading conductor and an arranger for rock bands. He seems to barely have time to take part in legal cases. But he got into it in the late 1980s when a friend and collaborator, Greek musician Vangelis, was accused of plagiarizing someone’s work for his “Chariots of Fire” theme.
Protheroe had a music degree from Oxford University and so Vangelis’ lawyers felt Protheroe had the qualifications to convince a judge that Vangelis had written a similar melody to “Chariots of Fire” long before the tune he was accused of stealing had appeared.
Protheroe has kept taking cases ever since, partly for the intellectual challenge, but also because he enjoys being exposed to new music.
There are some younger forensic musicologists. Oxendale is training his son to be one.
In Boston, there is Joe Bennett, 47, the dean of the Boston Conservatory, part of the Berklee College of Music, who spends spare evenings doing copyright work. He’s mainly hired by advertising agencies to ensure their songs do not accidentally copy anything.
“‘Accidentally’ in quote marks,” he said with a laugh, because some advertisers seek to have music sound as close as possible to existing music without crossing the copyright line.
People often hear similarities between songs when no copying has occurred, Bennett said. That should not be a surprise. Most songwriters follow a strict set of rules — songs being three to four minutes long or having four beats to a bar — so there is actually much scope for similarity. But the truth is that many songwriters do use other people’s music for inspiration.
“Society’s become enamored by the romantic myth of creativity,” he said. “The idea that inspiration comes to us in a genius-like way from God or the spirit or whatever. Often for songwriters, that is how it feels emotionally. But, of course, every songwriter is partly a product of their influences.”
Oxendale agrees. “A lot of famous songs have been created using reference tracks and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “There would be no Beethoven without Haydn. Who would want to have lost his music?”