Ed Sheeran’s High Court copyright battle has given a rare glimpse of the riches in store for the world’s top songwriters.
Sheeran, 31, and his co-writers on Shape of You are earning about £5 million a year from the song, the court has heard, despite almost 10 per cent of the payments being frozen.
Payments for radio and public performances of the 2017 track were suspended after another singer claimed elements of Shape of You had been stolen from his 2015 song Oh Why.
The copyright case between Sheeran and the rival songwriter, Sami Chokri, heard that when royalties were frozen in May 2018, revenues from plays of the song on streaming services, such as Spotify, could not be targeted — meaning Sheeran, his co-writers and the record labels owning their publishing rights still enjoyed a bumper annual pay cheque of about £5 million.
Andrew Sutcliffe, QC, who is representing Chokri and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue, said “only a very small proportion, less than 10 per cent” of payments had been frozen after his clients asserted their copyright claim to the Performing Rights Society in May 2018.
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This 10 per cent had amounted to about £2.2 million, Sutcliffe said, adding that the “tune code dealing with streaming [revenues] had not been frozen”.
Shape of You, a Grammy-winning track which was number one in dozens of countries, is the first song to be streamed three billion times on Spotify.
The court heard this morning that Sony and Universal, two of the three biggest record labels in the world and which possess publishing copyrights over Shape of You, had spent thousands of pounds on separate musicology reports to bolster Sheeran’s case that there had been no copyright infringement.
Sutcliffe said three separate experts had been used by Sheeran’s team before they presented a report of Anthony Ricigliano, who taught at Manhattan School of Music for more than 30 years.
Ricigliano told the court he thought Oh Why and Shape of You were “two distinctively different compositions”. He said the “overall lyrics, organisation of pitch series, rhythm, melodic contour and melodic development” were “dramatically different”.
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Chokri, who performs as Sami Switch, and O’Donoghue have claimed that the “Oh why” hook in their 2015 track was ripped off by Sheeran and his co-writers, Johnny McDaid — a member of Snow Patrol — and Steven McCutcheon, a producer known as Steve Mac.
They said the central “Oh I” hook in Shape of You is “strikingly similar”. Chokri has told the court he felt “robbed by someone I respect, or respected”.
Sheeran and his co-writers have said they had not even heard Oh Why by the time they created Shape of You in October 2016. He said during one session they had decided to create a “sort of vocal chant section using the minor pentatonic scale, to come after the chorus”.
He said “Heya” had morphed into “Oh I” following a suggestion from Steve Mac. Sheeran added that he had frequently used the minor pentatonic scale. In his evidence Ricigliano said the pentatonic five-pitch scale was “very widely used in music generally”. He quoted Leonard Bernstein who said it was “humanity’s favourite scale and is so well known that one can find examples of it from all corners of the Earth”.
