Why Rosé’s On the Ground Sounds Familiar
In 1970, George Harrison was trying to write a genuine gospel song. He wanted to blend American religious musical tradition with his growing faith in Hinduism. From his experimentation came My Sweet Lord, one of his most beloved solo singles. A few months later, came a copyright lawsuit. Harrison was found guilty of unintentionally plagiarizing The Chiffons’ song He’s So Fine. When asked about it later, he admitted that the similarities were obvious and that he was surprised he hadn’t realized it earlier. Everyone from the Rolling Stones to Yubin has accidentally borrowed a melody from other musicians. The question is whether or not that’s what happened with Rosé’s new single, On the Ground.
On the Ground has been compared to two western pop songs. Her chorus seems to hold a striking resemblance to the chorus of Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved. Listening through or singing along, the two songs do feel similar, though looking at the tunes written out shows another story.
There are a couple of places where the songs share the same notes, but they are mostly pretty different. But if the songs don’t have the same melody, why do they sound the same?
The answer comes from how our brains process music. For the average person — those of us who will never make it into Julliard and don’t have Shawn Mendez’s perfect pitch — it isn’t easy to distinguish different notes. Instead, our brain focuses on the rhythm of a song and whether the notes go up or down. We don’t really care how much they go up or down, which explains why drunk karaoke works even though it shouldn’t. Rather than remembering the tune of a song as “C, F, F, C, C, A,” we remember it as “start, up, same, down, same, up.” How the song moves, regardless of the actual notes being played, is called the contour of a song.
If two songs have a similar contour, our brains will hear them the same way. That’s the key to understanding why On the Ground and Someone You Loved sound similar. If we look back at the written music for the two songs and keep the idea of contours in mind, they do start to look similar.
The first bar (a bar is delineated by a | ) of both songs make a large leap upwards and a small step down before diverging — with the exception of two D sixteenth notes ending the third bar — until the last two bars. Both choruses end with a similar movement of ups and downs, though the rhythm isn’t identical.
On the Ground is definitely different from Someone You Loved, but it has also been compared to Taylor Swift’s Blank Space. The pre-chorus of Rosé’s single sounds a little like part of Swift’s verse.
I would argue, that sonically the songs sound more dissimilar than Rosé and Capaldi’s songs, though the written music would, once again, suggest otherwise. The first bar of each song is nearly identical with only one note difference.
The second and third bar follows the same contour and hit many of the same or very similar notes. But does this constitute plagiarism? Like most things, the answer is a frustrating, “it depends.” When it comes to copyright law, there is no specific metric to decide if a song is too similar. There is no percentage of shared notes or similar movements (other than 100%) that shows one song is copying another.
Often a ruling comes down to factors outside of the music, like how well the lawyers and their experts explain how the songs are similar or different and how well the judge understands what they are being told. But the most important factor is whether or not the artist (or more often, their management and production companies) wants to pursue a lawsuit.
When deciding if a piece of music has been plagiarized, the question generally isn’t how similar the songs sound (I personally don’t think Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines sounds the same as Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up but that still lead to a payout). The question is whether or not anyone feels like fighting over it, and after two weeks of silence from both Swift and Capaldi, it seems like they are taking their free publicity and letting this one slide.
