Sam Smith to pay Tom Petty royalties on 'Stay With Me'

[imbondz]

Ouch. Pay up!

www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2015/01/26/sam-smith-stay-with-me-tom-petty-i-wont-back-down/22346051/


Sam Smith will be sharing his songwriting royalties for Stay With Me with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. Shortly after the British singer's single came out last April, sharp-eared listeners noticed a similarity between Stay With Me and Petty's 1989 hit I Won't Back Down, which he wrote with Lynne. They weren't the only ones. A representative for Smith says he and two other Stay With Me writers, James Napier and William Phillips, "came to an immediate and amicable agreement" with Petty and Lynne and now list them as co-writers of the song.

The claim was settled in October, according to British newspaper The Sun, with Petty and Lynne splitting a 25% share of songwriting royalties of Smith's song, which is nominated for song of the year at the Feb. 8 Grammy Awards.

[imbondz]

here's both back to back:

songsalike.com/similar-songs/tom-petty-i-wont-back-down-vs-sam-smith-stay-with-me/

[Devil Marlena Nylund]

Is it really just those three notes? I legitimately thought an artist couldn't 'own' such a little chunk of melody.

[imbondz]

Yeah seems a little picky to me. Unless the chord progression, notes and note length are all the same not sure.

Definitely hear the same melody pieces but...


It's not like Ghostbusters and I Want A New Drug which are pretty much the same music throughout.

[Jack]

Haha. I remember hearing a little something about this.

It's the fact that the opening ten notes of the top line melody of I Won't Back Down are the exact ten notes of the top line melody for the hook of Stay With Me (in publishing I think one can make a case if they go past six notes of the same sequence). That's where he came unstuck and there was a case for it. Not even chord progressions or anything like that. If you played both the melody of the lines "No I won't back down, no I won't back down" and "Won't you stay with me, cause you're all I need" on a piano they would be identical. Since it's the hook, thus the draw/staple of Stay With Me and its success I was not at all surprised to hear about the royalty split. It's even exactly the same timing and intonation of those notes. Had the spacing been different or the timing between notes, he might have even got away with it.

Imagine for an instance if someone came up with a song where the hook matched the melody of the hook line "I wanna hold your haaaand" by The Beatles. It's ten notes. If that ten notes in that order became the whole crux of which your song was based around, not only would there be a case for it, but there would an outcry.

[Devil Marlena Nylund]

Yeah, I can see it now when I continued with both songs in my head. Lol

[Luckie Starchild]

When "Stay With Me" first came out, I was going nuts because I was thinking it was a cover... and I was sure I had heard it before...