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?
In: 531
Chords are to music as words are to language
so a chord progression is like a sentence
so trying to copywrite a chord progression is like trying to copywrite “once upon a time…” or “so we went to down to the river” simply because you published a story that contained those sentences.
It’s not quite that simple but that is the general gist of it
Trying to be a little more “explain like I’m five” than the rest of the answers on here if I can…
A chord is 2 or more notes played together.
Depending on the which two notes they are… they will either will make you feel happy or sad. A better way to describe this is that they will have a feeling of tension or relief or somewhere in between. Some combos feel like a lot of tension, and others feel like just a little tension and same with relief chords. There are also chords that feel perfectly neutral.
A chord progression is a “journey” through a sequence of chords, generally they end on a “relief chord” at least with Western pop music.
So the question is: can you copyright that journey? I think most musicians would tell you “no.”
It’s not that the *one* in question was uncopyrightable, it’s that he was trying to demonstrate how none should be because even with the one in question has been used by many others since that “original”, as well as decades and centuries before it. There’s only so many notes, which means a finite number of chords. And with those chords, they can only be put into a finite number of combinations.
In pure theory the idea of copyrighting chord progressions is ludicrous:
Tonic-Subdominant-Tonic-Dominant-Tonic is the basic form of almost every rock & roll song from 1956-1962.
If you take a scale, lets use “C Major” to make our lives much easier
C. D. E. F. G. A. B. C.
1,2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8
You will find so many songs (ie The Beatles) use the chords taken from the scales I, IV, V. (1, 4, 5)
Or the first note I the Fourth note IV and Fifth V note of the scale to make up a song.
So it will be considered to be in the key of C and will be the progression of the chords C, F and the G Chord.
Each chord itself is made up of the individual notes
C = CEG
F = FAC
G = GBD
There can be a variety of combinations starting with any of the notes but this 1,4,5 progression is the most famous.
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