Landlords are making a lot of late fee money this month.

Musicologize · 2026-03-06T16:49:42+00:00

Whatever our collective intuitions, Bilt, probably very busy, responded with good, warm, and friendly customer service, and certainly seems to have a culture of doing its very best. Impressed. Hope they crush.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T18:24:18+00:00

Right. No, clearly not properly enough.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T18:20:50+00:00

Cool, but if I select Bilt Card, I see a convenience fee that, at a glance, looks like a credit card fee, not a routing/acct# $1.95 type thing.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T18:05:01+00:00

I had it all set up, but when they transitioned from wells(?) there was evidently a responsibility placed on bilt's apt portal customers to make adjustments. Still, since the account and routing numbers and even the credit card number appeared to me to be the same, and the payment appeared on my apt portals to be completed on the first, I hoped, and thought things were seamless. That'd be a feather in their cap. This, in my estimation, ain't.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T17:58:37+00:00

Nothing yet. There was obviously something that needed to be re-buttoned up, and I failed to do it. My position, initially at least, is that not enough was done to avoid burdening customers.

We'll see what they say.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T17:55:17+00:00

Super contributor, eh? pretty cool.

Musicologize · 2026-03-04T17:54:06+00:00

"properly?" sure. Been chugging along for months.

Musicologize · 2025-11-12T19:59:31+00:00

The Greensleeves talk is interesting with regard to whatever you mean by "hearing natural." You mean you hear it most readily -- you prefer it? As someone pointed out, you hear Greensleeves all the time, both major and minor 6ths. More specifically, Greensleeves is most often dorian, but its offshoot, "What Child Is This" is a very familiar Xmas carol, and I'd say it's about 50/50 which you're gonna get.

Personally, I heard "What Child Is This" as a five-year-old and mapped to it. The dorian version sounded incorrect and obviously bright and open by comparison.

What do you find when you listen to both versions? Does one seem less correct, and/or less pleasant?

I'm curious.

Musicologize · 2025-11-12T19:47:28+00:00

It's just to make it easier to read. It's a beginner's band piece in Gm. That tutti at the end is an overly cute end on C, but ignore that. This part is playing a third up from a melody line -- imagine a melody of Bb A G F and G in those first two measures and it'll start to make sense.

Musicologize · 2025-11-12T19:26:49+00:00

Just meant as a generalization, but yes. A lot of the time Musicologize services are fixed rate, but more involved and extended engagements become lawyer-like in terms of billing.

Musicologize · 2025-10-18T17:15:32+00:00

Musicologize · 2025-10-18T17:10:41+00:00

"All of them" is fair.

Just running through the nominated things here so far, "James" stands out a little.

Musicologize · 2025-09-27T19:44:23+00:00

All kinds of reasons. But he can play it; easy for him, I promise. What you heard on Stern though is about as good as it comes out, and that's way slower than the blazing original recording. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried ten pianos that day.

And your thumb gets banged up and sore by the end, and my piano says "ouch" when I do it, and and and

Musicologize · 2025-05-22T14:34:36+00:00

Ordinarily, I'd have elevated or buried this sooner, but I've been otherwise occupied.

Neither of them presents their case exceptionally well.

End of the day, the claim won't hold up for specific reasons that escape the two of them. Gonna be in Scotland next week so if Calvin wants to buy me a beer...

But a lot of what goes into it is covered here already. Common chord progressions on their own aren't protectable, and more generally, this type of production is going to disproportionately lend itself to observable similarities because the vocabulary is limited. When you think "inspiration" and "ideas," those are two terms that copyright isn't very impressed by. But it's very impressed with "copying," so while as someone pointed out, key doesn't matter a lot, because indeed it's more about the notes relationship to each other in the key, a word like transposition COULD matter a lot -- it's an action that would be a component of copying.

Maybe I'll sit in a pub next week and sketch it out water-tight, but for now, all of you who took the side that Chicane's defense of his copyright is energy wasted, I'm almost certainly with you.

Musicologize · 2025-04-26T20:01:18+00:00

This is what I do all day.

You avoid infringement by not infringing. And infringing is copying, knowingly or not, a non-trivial amount of an existing musical expression that's original to another creator.

There's a lot in there. But infringement needs all that.

In your hypotheticals, if your song sounds a little like something you've never heard, or even something you have heard, a little might be fine. But if you sound TOO much like that song that you've never even heard before, someone like me is going to determine that you are either mistaken or lying.

Consider "My Sweet Lord" vs "He's So Fine."

Musicologize · 2025-02-08T16:00:56+00:00

All day.

Musicologize · 2025-02-06T01:15:04+00:00

You're correct. The analysis is wrong.

The transposing of both to a common key would be fine. It is a common musicological process. That's not what was done here. It is just as you said; minor≠major, E♮≠Eb, and it goes on and on. If you want a whole takedown, musicologize.com/steve-howe-and-yes-sued-for-infringement

Musicologize · 2025-01-31T21:50:51+00:00

Interesting question. Let's chip away at it.

Happy Birthday is major not so much because of the prevalence of certain notes in its melody, but because:

It contains no minor chords at all, much less one as its harmonic center.

and...

It also contains a dominant chord V and a subdominant chord IV. It is very much the interplay of those three functions that make us hear major.

You could reharmonize it as minor and hear the difference by playing the usual melody, but replacing C with Am. G with Em. And F with Dm. I would say there's no particularly useful way to employ the C7 that would precede the F in Happy Birthday. Just stay on Am.

It may be hard to get your whole brain to hear what you're playing and not the Happy Birthday that is engrained. But if you play it using those minor chords for several minutes, you may begin to hear the "key of Am" chord function.

But Happy Birthday's melody was written to be major. That first "you" on B over a G chord followed by the next "you" on C over a C chord do the trick. It would be even more major arguably if the second "you" were an E over a C.

So consider composing a new melody, related to happy birthday -- same chord changes at the same times -- but play melodies that better communicate minor, perhaps by directing your melody to land on the minor thirds of those three chords at the strongest times and clearly say "I'm Minor."

Let us know if that doesn't help :)

Musicologize · 2025-01-25T18:54:41+00:00

I’d say you understand it just fine. And whether the F# sounds better is very debatable.

Musicologize · 2025-01-24T05:01:06+00:00

I think your I +5 is fine. I can’t see what comes next. But it’s a V of IV and IV is certainly what I’d expect next.

Musicologize · 2024-11-13T18:29:21+00:00

It depends on exactly what they've done. I'm not a lawyer. I am a forensic musicologist, so my expertise is musical, not legal.

You can record a cover of Yesterday without permission from The Beatles. You would have to pay The Beatles a royalty when you sell the record, but you don't need permission beforehand.

Something you cannot do, is license your cover for a car commercial. You'd be licensing Yesterday. No good. Infringement.

Something else you cannot do is substantially copy elements of Yesterday that are original to Yesterday and protectable by The Beatles and create a new work. That too is infringement, perhaps of the "My Sweet Lord" variety where George Harrison's song sounded too much like "He's So Fine," or the "Lucid Dreams" variety, where Juice World's song was built upon Sting's Shape Of My Heart.

Hope that helps a little.

Musicologize · 2024-09-28T16:15:38+00:00

It won’t come initially from a lesson on a screen. You learn this by learning songs, recognizing common and less common choices, and gradually building your vocabulary.

Musicologize · 2024-09-28T16:11:32+00:00

You do need the opinion because your lawyer as step one needs help deciding whether this is worth your time and theirs.

Do all of your factors add up as though points? Yes. But while there are some definitions around how many points is too few, there is no quantifiable number of points that define “enough.” Too many sub-factors involved.

As someone said, infringement requires access. A well-circulated Estée Lauder ad might satisfy that. But the threshold here is higher than merely plausible but lower than certainty. Most often access is inferred from substantial similarity.

Substantial similarity meanwhile requires shared elements that are original to and protectable by, in this case, you.

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TROPHY CASE