The “Blurred Lines” judgment re: Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up” is a wake-up call to the ad agencies and marketers.
Protecting musical copyrights has always been a kind of “Karma Policing” for ad agencies, whereby it’s bad karma to appropriate an existing composition and good karma to make sure that creators don’t infringe on other creators’ works.
The jury in the “Blurred Lines” case wrought some good karma when they ordered Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke to pay the Gaye estate over $7 million.
Pharrell called the verdict “a horrible precedent for music and creativity going forward.”
I say the precedent supports respecting creativity and, in the case of advertising, the unique role of an agency’s music team: procuring great music, whether original or existing, and guiding all the collaborators through the pitfalls of copyrights, talent and financial arrangements.
“Blurred Lines,” written by Williams and Thicke, isn’t in my mind a technical infringement of Gaye’s classic tune in terms of the melody, or the harmony, or the bass line, or the instrumentation, but, a rip off of the track’s inherent feel and utterly unique sound. Thus if the jury was being faithful to the actual claim, they probably wouldn’t have found for the Gaye family, but that’s a different discussion.
But “Blurred Lines” definitely seems like a “soundalike,” music that a producer, musician, writer, etc., intentionally or not, jacks/steals/borrows someone’s sound, someone’s inventiveness, someone’s original and distinctive sonic aura, someone’s creativity.
In popular music, imitation can be seen at times as flattery, as an aspect of musical influence, or a respect for a distinctive or historical style.
In the advertising space, you’re procuring music for corporate commerce. Flattery is moot. There are creators out there, successful and unsuccessful, busy and not, who are waiting to hear something that sounds like their work, or somewhat like their work, or something that slightly resembles their work.
They oftentimes see dollar signs in their eyes, and make a claim. Many of these claims are frivolous, without merit, baseless, even ridiculous.
But some aren’t.
Most music experts in my field can listen to an ad and more times than not, tell you exactly what the reference track was.
Music industry analysts predict the verdict is going to open the floodgates for an “onslaught” of lawsuits that will “infect” the music industry, creating a culture of litigation-mania. But that ethos has already been rampant for years in music for advertising.
The judgment is in the end a reinforcement of what we’re all here to serve and protect: creativity.
As curators of music for brands, we should never allow soundalikes to happen. We’re a business of creators, not borrowers. Our currency in the branding marketplace is creativity – respect it.
Josh Rabinowitz is executive VP/director of music for Grey New York.
