Katy Perry and Music Plagiarism

For the second time in recent years, Katy Perry has been accused of plagiarizing a melody for one of her popular songs.

The culprit this time? Her hit single “Dark Horse”. Four Christian hip-hop artists, including Marcus Gray, pka Flame; Lecrae Moore, pka Lecrae; Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu alleged that Perry ripped off the tune to their song, “Joyful Noise”.

The rappers are mad about more than just the alleged theft of the tune. They are also claiming that “Dark Horse” ruined the tune as a result of its association with Perry’s music video, which includes images of “witchcraft”, “paganism”, and “black magic”. The melody in question consists of one note, the minor third, repeated four times, then another note, the minor second, which is repeated three times. For a comparison, here is Katy Perry’s Dark Horse and Flame’s Joyful Noise.

The two songs clearly sound very different, but a comparison of the notes can be seen over at The Guardian. DJ Cho’zyn Boy, who works for Marcus Gray and first detected the similarity, explained to The Guardian that the melodies sound “identical” when you change their tempos and bring Perry’s down one octave.

Music plagiarism

Plagiarism is frequently an issue in the music industry for obvious reasons. Most musicians start off by playing other artists’ music and as they develop, they end up borrowing from those who have gone before. Without this kind of borrowing, there would be no genres or traditions in the music industry.

Artists generally accept that all music includes patterns and formal sets of rules – particularly when working within the limited number of notes on the western musical scale. For this reason, accidental plagiarism is accepted as a legitimate possibility, a factor that makes it distinct from many other forms of plagiarism.

The problem comes into play when artists go past borrowing and into the territory of outright theft. Accidental plagiarism makes it very difficult to prove that an artist intentionally stole part of a song, and so U.S. copyright law requires that plaintiffs can prove “access” and “similarity”. Access means here that the defendant had heard the song at some point before creating his or her song and similarity means that both songs share unique musical components.

Joyful Noise was released to the public in 2008 on a Grammy-nominated album, and received a Dove Award nomination itself. While this doesn’t explicitly prove that Perry heard the song – she absolutely had access to it. The songs also share questionably similar musical components. Whether or not these components are unique is likely to be a major question in court.

A ruling for the plaintiffs would allow the previously little-known hip-hop group to see some or all of the proceeds for a song that remained in the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for weeks in January and which Perry has performed live numerous times.

See also, the other piece I wrote about Katy Perry regarding her latest lawsuit:

• Katy Perry Sues Over $2 Million ‘Oral Agreement’ Made with European Brand