Pop star Ed Sheeran, 31, is currently battling accusations that he impersonated the monster who hit “Shape of You.”
Three weeks have been set aside for a trial in London’s High Court, where the Briton must respond to accusations of copying parts of Sami Shoukry’s 2015 song “Oh Why”
Sheeran denies wrongdoing, and in court on Tuesday he sang with him BBC Tracks from “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone and “No Diggity” by Blackstreet to illustrate how identical snippets can be heard in pop music.
-If you sing them all in the same key, they sound exactly the same, Sheeran explained in court.
“Shape of You” topped the charts all over the world in 2017, approx billion plays In less than half a year, it has since broken the record as Spotify’s most played song of all time.
But Sami Shukri – who goes by the name of artist Sami Switch – claims that Sheeran has violated copyright law.
Shukri and producer Ross O’Donoghue, both in court, accuse Sheeran of stealing tracks – and fail to give them credit, because they “are not old enough artists”.
For his part, Sheeran asserts that he has always been interested in accreditation, and denies ever hearing Shukri’s song before accusing him of stealing parts of it.
According to the BBC, Sheeran’s earnings on “Shape of You” are estimated to be around 240 million NOK. That amount has been frozen since 2018, when Shukri and O’Donoghue first made the allegations.
Shukri and the co-plaintiff’s attorney played both songs in court, and Sheeran was asked if he heard the similarities between the disputing party.
– Basically, yes. Both are based on the same pentatonic scale (Musical scale with five notes per octave, editor’s note.), both of which have undertones in them, Sheeran explained.
Andrew Sutcliffe, an attorney for the opposite party, earlier this week called Sheeran a “music-obsessed squirrel” who “greedily consumes other people’s music.” The lawyer thinks it’s highly likely that it’s Sheeran King He heard the plaintiff’s song before he made his own.
– I like music, I love music, and I listen to music, Sheeran replied, but he made it clear that in 2016 he “disappeared from music” for a whole year, and that he was not “associated with music in his homeland.”
Sheeran insists that he came up with the controversial song in collaboration with his songwriting partners Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid.
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