ROCK-O-LLECTIONS

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Frank-Truatt-2 ROCK-O-LLECTIONSBy Frank “Smokin” Truatt

As we move towards the end of January, I haven’t heard a new song this year so far, that I consider to be great. I know it’s early in the year, but back in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, new music came out weekly, and many of those tunes were very catchy from the start. I began to wonder if there is a definitive number of original songs or melodies and are we approaching the day that we’ve heard it all. We hear some songs today that sound like a tune from the past, yet they are all somewhat different. It could be the music or the lyrics, or maybe both. Is it possible that there is a point where we could run out of original music given the limited combination of notes and instruments available to play them on? It’s a great question and one that the experts in the music industry have been working on, and most say no, that the combinations of possible melodies are so large that, at least for the foreseeable future, we have nothing to worry about. Granted, in today’s world, every song is dissected to see if it resembles a tune in the past therefore infringing on a copyright. Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up” and later, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was a famous case with the heirs of Marvin Gaye winning a $7.4 million case. We all remember George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and The Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine.” That case took five years to get to trial, eventually costing George half a million dollars. To the average person, those two songs have absolutely nothing in common, but when compared note by note, there were enough similarities to call “foul!”. George Harrison was caught by surprise, and his later release “This Song” was a response to the court case with the lyrics “This song has nothing tricky about it. This song ain’t black or white and as far as I know, don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright.” It’s got to be on any songwriters mind when they create a new tune. So, maybe there are fewer new releases these days, but they will still be coming out with seemingly no end in sight. Don’t forget, artificial intelligence will be creating some new tunes and lyrics down the road too. Good luck suing a computer for copyright infringement!