How To Avoid Plagiarism In Music

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about avoiding plagiarism. Now every songwriters greatest fear, even greater than writers block is subconscious plagiarism. If you have any creditability you're going to make sure you don't consciously rip off anybodys song. But in the back of your mind you may have an idea that you think is your own that actually came from something else you heard. Anything you write the inspiration comes from somewhere. You'll even find that many classic songs all have very similar chords and melodies and that's where styles come from. There's a certain point of which it's just the same person's innervation that you're copying and that's when it's plagiarism. There had been some very famous cases with plagiarism, George Harrison was sued for a song of his that was considered to be a rip off of an older Motown song. Once you write a song you should check to see if anyone has written the same song. So go through your CD's, go through your MP3's, whatever, take a listen and see if anything sounds familiar. Usually everything is fine. Every once in a while I hear something and I hear a similarly and I say oh, that's too close. So then show it to your friends and see what they say, ask them to be honest. You don't want people to flatter you here, you want to truth and if they say it sounds similar then you might want to consider reworking an idea. Even just a little bit to make it different enough. A lot of times you're going to think something sounds really familiar and other people just aren't going to hear it. This has happened to me plenty of times where I've written a song and I thought oh that's way too close and someone else would hear it and say, what are you talking about that doesn't sound anything like that. The important thing to remember is that even if you're drawing on someone else's ideas subconsciously, as long as you're providing a unique approach to something you're fine. The only time you're really going to get in trouble for any kind of plagiarism is when you're visible enough that you're already pretty famous. So if you get to the point where you're getting sued like George Harrison did, you can say well at least I'm George Harrison that's not so bad."