I watched a video where he demonstrated that many songs use the same tune / Chord progression (?). What is chord progression and why was the one in question essentially uncopyrightable?
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ELI5: A chord is like when someone strums all the strings on a guitar at once – they’re playing multiple notes that come together and make one chord. The majority of popular music is made up of a few of those chords used in a row and repeated throughout the song.
There are only 12 major chords just like there are only 12 musical notes. You can imagine that if we have a limited amount of notes and chords and if the most popular combinations of those chords are used regularly we must sometimes find songs that sound similar. This is why copyright lawsuits don’t get off the ground with simply similar chord progressions – they have to prove that the songs are identical.
[Here is a link](https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ) to a famous video of a musical comedy troupe performing a bunch of popular songs using the same 4 chords.
Of course, it is more complicated than this, and there are more than just the 12 major chords. For the sake of this argument, though, the sounds we like the most are limited in number.
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