Olivia Dean’s record label is getting sued because her song “I’ve Seen It” allegedly borrows too heavily from Bill Withers’ “Just The Two of Us.” The lawsuit arrived with the urgency of a cease-and-desist email sent at 11:59 PM on a Friday.
Here’s the thing: both songs use notes. Specifically, notes that exist on the same twelve-note chromatic scale that every musician since Bach has been recycling for three centuries. The label’s lawyers are presumably arguing that a particular arrangement of those notes—a chord progression, a melodic contour, a rhythm—belongs exclusively to one artist, as if Withers somehow patented the concept of minor sevenths and smooth vocal delivery.
The music industry has built an entire legal infrastructure around the idea that originality is real and quantifiable. It is neither. Every pop song is a statistical recombination of every song that came before it, filtered through a producer’s taste and a label’s A&R department’s ability to recognize what will stream well on Spotify. The notes don’t belong to anyone. They never did.
What the lawsuit actually proves is simpler: major labels will sue over anything that might cost them money if they don’t. The threat of litigation is cheaper than admitting that modern music is an infinite remix of an infinite remix. Withers’ estate gets a settlement, Dean’s label pays lawyers, and somewhere in a studio in Los Angeles, a different artist is already recording a song that will sound suspiciously similar to both of them.
The cosmic playlist doesn’t care about ownership. The music industry does, because ownership is where the money lives.