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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A chord is just multiple notes played at the same time, usually because they sound nice together. A chord progression is just a series of different chords used in a particular order to give structure to a song. You can see [a hilarious video](https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I) of lots of songs that use the same chord progression on YouTube.
I haven’t read the opinion in the case, but generally, you can’t copyright a chord progression because it’s too basic. Sheeran’s song is an R&B ballad. That means it *has to* have certain qualities to its tonality and rhythm that make it sound like an R&B ballad. Adam Neely [sums it up nicely](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpi4d3YM79Q). You can’t own chords.
Chords are different groupings of musical notes played at the same time that make a nice harmonic sound. A chord progression is when going through the song the chords are changed in sequence that builds a foundation for the song.
Good chord progressions sound good so they’re used a lot. Here’s an 11 year old YouTube video called “4 Chords” that demonstrates this whole concept. https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ
(I do not know specifically what chord progression is in question in this case though)
A chord progression is the order in which groups of musical notes (chords) are played. There are only 12 notes in the entirety of music and so you can only put them together in so many ways. Only some of these orders sound good.
There’s a saying that goes, “there’s no such thing as new music” because we’ve already made music with every combination available.
With such a small number of chord progressions that sound good it’s inevitable that you’ll have multiple popular songs that sound the same. That’s the argument they used to win the case
A chord progression is just what it sounds like: a selection of chords arranged in a specific order. Popular music tends to draw from a very small pool of commonly-used chords, and the permutations that result in a progression that is musically meaningful and pleasing to the ear is correspondingly small.
It should be borne in mind that the outcome of a copyright lawsuit favors the side that makes the better argument, and not necessarily what musical analysis reveals.
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.
A chord is a stack of individual notes happening at the same time and western music for the last several hundred years has been obsessed with naming the stacks that people really seem to enjoy and describing the patterns between the notes of a stack and how they all move to create the next stack in time. A single stack is a chord and several stacks over time is a chord progression.
Chord progressions in some way can be thought of as floor plans where you can build 100 houses on the same basic layout but get 100 unique houses by changing up a few rooms and decorating differently.
In that way an extremely common chord progression like the “Four Chords of Pop” or the “Doo-wop Changes” can almost be considered as a basic design structure like “Colonial”. But have the same progression doesn’t really make 2 songs identical any more so than my neighbor’s house and mine both having basements makes our houses the same.
Court cases based on chord progressions are super common. Most of them fail, because as others here have already noted, there just aren’t that many ways to combine the 12 musical notes.
Finding that a chord progression is someone’s intellectual property would basically make it impossible for people to make new music.
A good example can be found if you look up “[Pachelbel’s progression](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon)”, a chord progression found in / popularized by Pachelbel’s Canon in D major.
If Pachelbel had sued everyone that used it after him and won, and it became an intellectual property asset someone could own in perpetuity, the list of songs that wouldn’t exist in the form we currently know would be huge.
It is possible to successfully sue another artist for plagiarizing your music – there are cases where that happens and the court finds in favor of the claimant. But for that to happen, you generally have to be claiming intellectual property rights over something more unique to your work and that wouldn’t absolutely cripple the industry if you won.
One of the earliest and most recognizable versions of this chord progression is “Canon in D” by Johann Pachelbel. It was composed in 1680. Being that old, it is no longer subject to copyright laws and is therefore public domain.
Pop music is essentially a formula. An ever narrowing one, at that. Pop songs use all of the same stuff because it gets people to spend money.
A chord is a group of notes played together.
A chord progression is a series of chords.
It’s a fundamental building block of music.
So attempting to copyright a specific chord progression is similar to attempting to copyright a common word. Not that people don’t attempt this, also, and are sometimes successful.
But like with copyrighting a common word, context is important. For example, if you own a video game IP called Mirror’s Edge, you would have a case if someone else made a video game called Mirrored Edge.
But if someone made a romance movie called Look in the Mirror you’d have no chance.
It’s the same in music- context is important. If the songs are substantively different, even if they use the same or similar chord progression it’s usually a no-case. But if the songs are very tonally similar, it’s less cut and dry.
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