Robbie Williams has defended Olivia Rodrigo after he noticed similarities between two of their songs.<\/p>\n
Rodrigo recently released her first Christmas song, Take Me Home (4 Christmas), which was inspired by The Waitresses’ 1981 song Christmas Wrapping.<\/p>\n
Fans thought Rodrigo\u2019s song also bore a similarity to Williams\u2019 2012 single Candy, which went to number one in the UK.<\/p>\n
The speculation prompted Williams to defend Rodrigo, saying he thinks a lot of plagiarism accusations in the music industry are not justified.<\/p>\n
He wrote on Instagram: “There\u2019s something about the music industry that\u2019s been bothering me for a while.<\/p>\n
“People coming after people because they\u2019ve spotted a similarity between two songs. Some of it I completely understand.<\/p>\n
“Some of it is absolutely justified. Most of it, I think, is complete ********.<\/p>\n
“I\u2019ve had plenty of people come after me over the years because something I\u2019ve released apparently sounds like something somebody else released.<\/p>\n
“And sometimes I listen and think, fair enough, I can hear that. Other times I think, are you having a laugh?”<\/p>\n
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Discussing Rodrigo, he added: “It sounds to me as though she may have accidentally stumbled across a musical echo of mine in one of her new songs.<\/p>\n
“And do you know what? I couldn\u2019t care less. I don\u2019t know whether there\u2019s technically a publishing issue, a copyright issue, or no issue whatsoever.<\/p>\n
“And I don\u2019t want to know. I\u2019m not going after her. Because I think at some point, some sanity has to prevail.<\/p>\n
“Now, I appreciate I\u2019m in a position in my career where I can afford to take that view.<\/p>\n
“Not everybody is. And genuine theft is genuine theft. Artists deserve to be protected.<\/p>\n
“But there\u2019s a difference between protecting your work and treating every vaguely familiar sequence of notes as a winning lottery ticket.<\/p>\n
“Some of this stuff has become ambulance chasing. And I think it\u2019s disgusting.”<\/p>\n
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Williams said he feels it is inevitable that artists will sometimes produce music that has a similar sound or melody to other songs.<\/p>\n
He wrote: “We all stand on the shoulders of people who came before us. Sometimes consciously. Sometimes without even knowing it. That\u2019s how music works.<\/p>\n
“If we keep punishing people for accidentally arriving somewhere somebody else has already been, eventually we\u2019re going to frighten the creativity out of everyone.<\/p>\n
“Anyway, Olivia, if you\u2019re reading this, I think you\u2019re brilliant.”<\/p>\n
The Waitresses musician Christopher Butler revealed Rodrigo contacted him after being inspired by his song Christmas Wrapping and making her own track, Take Me Home (4 Christmas).<\/p>\n
Rodrigo\u2019s song has a noticeably similar beat and she also uses a comparable vocal style to the one heard on the 1981 song.<\/p>\n
Take Me Home (4 Christmas) was released on 5 November and is Rodrigo\u2019s first Christmas song.<\/p>\n
The track was accompanied by a music video which features Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon as well as US comedian and Saturday Night Live star Ben Marshall.<\/p>\n
Source: Press Association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robbie Williams has defended Olivia Rodrigo after he noticed similarities between two of their songs. Rodrigo recently released…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-679466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}