The Business of Music: Music Interpolations

The Business of Music:

ABCDEF GEE, What’s The Deal with Music Interpolations?

MICHAEL DUBOFF, entertainment lawyer at Edwards Creative Law – Canada’s Entertainment Law Boutique™

Recently, one of the biggest songs in the world that you were sure to hear on frequent rotation on the radio was Gayle’s abcdefu – a very catchy song about an ex-boyfriend.

The song inspired talented Canadian artist, Tyler Shaw, to offer his own take on the pop hit: the romantic, Love You Still (abcdefu romantic version).

Gayle’s version of the chorus begins:

A-B-C-D-E, F-U And your mom and your sister and your job

Tyler’s version goes like this:

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I love you still And you know I always will Tyler has gone as far as to say that his version is based on Gayle’s version – he doesn’t deny it – but Tyler’s version is not considered to be a “cover” of Gayle’s song.

Why is this? Tyler’s version is something more than a cover – it changes important elements of the song, most notably, the lyrics, and creates a derivative of the original song. Despite not being a cover, Tyler’s version is based on Gayle’s composition. As such, in order to produce his version, Tyler’s team needed permission from the people and/or companies that represent Gayle’s composition.

Like with most songs, they are not just written by one person, and therefore you need to find out who the writers and publishers are of the composition. One place to find this out is the ASCAP Repertory (https://www.ascap.com/repertory). From a search of this particular composition, you can see the list of writers, and Universal Music representing each of three writers, either directly or indirectly. A search on SOCAN’s Public Repertoire yields different search results in this case… but that’s for another article.

Whether it is an interpolation or a derivative work – one composition is based on the other – and permission is needed. In the case of Tyler Shaw’s, Love You Still (abcdefu romantic version), he needed permission from Universal Music.

Check out the credits on Tyler’s song – they list the same writers as Gayle’s version, plus Tyler. To be clear, simply giving people credit does not mean you have permission to use their music; however, in order to get permission you may need to promise to give credit where it is due: to the writers and publishers of the original work.

Unfortunately, finding the proper rightsholder is only the first challenge. The next one is getting them to respond to you, at all, let alone getting them to give you permission to use their composition.

Another popular type of derivative works are “response songs” – especially on TikTok. Response songs are written from the perspective of a different character in the same song. The artist recording the response song is generally not the writer or owner of the original song. Response songs usually require permission from the rightsholder as well, being the publisher(s) of the original song, as there tend to be elements of the response song taken from the original.

Also to note is that every song writer is their own music publisher until they provide their publishing rights to someone else.

So far, this article has focused on the rights in the composition – the underlying written music of the song – and have not addressed the rights in Gayle’s recording. The copyright in Gayle’s recording is distinct from the copyright in the underlying composition. Tyler does not need permission to use the recording if none of it is used in his song. In fact, Tyler did not use any of the original recording in his version, and no permission was required. However, if someone wanted to sample Gayle’s abcdefu, they would need permission from both the owner of the recording and the owner of the composition.

If you have questions about who you need to get rights from, or about the process, or if you need help navigating the agreement that a publishing company provides to you, Edwards Creative Law can help.

Michael can be reached at: michael.duboff@edwardslaw.ca Disclaimer: Edwards Creative Law (unfortunately) does not represent Gayle or Tyler Shaw.