Songwriting in the dock: Coldplay vs Satriani

I’m sure lots of our community will remember the recent Satriani/Coldplay case.

To summarise the story for those who don’t, Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ bore melodic and harmonic similarities to an instrumental composition called If I Could Fly by Joe Satriani.

Musically, here’s a summary of the context of the case.

Coldplay’s song uses a 4-chord loop that goes

||: Db  | Eb   | Ab   | Fm   :||

(IV - V - I - vi in the key of Ab major)

And the ‘Rule the World’ melody line starts on a C natural - the major third of the home key, creating an interesting major-7th sound to the first chord.

Satriani’s piece (the relevant passage can be heard here and starts at 0:50) uses a not dissimilar harmonic loop, and a melody that also starts on that major third (creating an interesting E minor 9th chord):

||: Em    | A     | Dmaj7  | Bm   :||

(ii - V - I - vi in the key of D major)

Put them both in the key of C and simplify the chords to make the maths easier, and you get two similar chord loops

Coldplay - ||: F   | G    | C    | Am  :||

Satriani - ||: Dm   | G   | C    | Am  :||

So what, you say? You can’t copyright a chord loop, especially not one that’s been used thousands of times already? Well, the harmonic context is only part of the story. A very quick listen to the tune, starting on that ‘quirky’ major third note (E natural in this transposed version) reveals a marked similarity - an exact match for the first three notes, rhythmically, contextually and melodically.

Coldplay themselves eventually responded publicly on their website, denying it all as a coincidence. Satriani had apparently planned to serve the papers live during last night’s Grammys, but backed off from this for reasons unclear. Disappointingly, some of the more entertaining mashups that YouTube users created have now been taken down; the best ones used some digital pitch and tempo mapping to make the similarities clear. This one is rather well-done, albeit poor quality technically.

Coincidence or plagiarism? To answer this question we need to know - how likely is it that two songwriters could come up with this exact melodic/harmonic combination? Effectively this is a collision between the infinite monkeys theorem and our own knowledge, as songwriters, of what goes on creatively when one devises melodic material over chord loops (I’m willing to bet that this is how both pieces were written - sounds like loop-based writing to me).

I have my own view, but won’t reveal it just yet - I’m interested to see if there is a weight of opinion from songwriters. Over to you - please comment… now!