Yellowcard Suing Juice WRLD

wow. this is nuts

 

How do these usually turn out? If it’s not a direct sample used without permission, I imagine these are hard to prove.

 

This seems pretty silly to me. I can hear the similarity but that melody is so generic, I doubt it was intentional.

 

Yeah I see some similarities but I expected it to be a bit more blatant based on the article.

 

Well there's a headline I wasn't expecting to see today.

 

Lawyers are impressive sometimes.

"Obviously if he listened to Fall Out Boy, he would have naturally started listening to Yellowcard/this song".

That's a reach I wouldn't necessarily have thought of to use for leverage for trying to win this.

 

Leaving a comment here so I can remember when I get home from work today to listen to both songs so I can get an idea for myself of how similar the two are.

 

It’s a bit of a stretch. I only thought I heard any similarities because I listened to both back to back upon hearing about this. I would have never made the connection otherwise. Seems unintentional, but that doesn’t mean they can’t win.

Recent wins by Tom Petty (over Sam Smith), Marvin Gaye (over Ed Sheehan), and a Christian rapper (over Katy Perry).

 

Or how they dug up a quote where one time he said he listened to emo music in fifth grade (the exact year this song came out) and used it as supporting evidence lol

I'd like to see all of these "objective similarities" just out of curiosity. You can easily hear similarities of the first line of "Holly Wood Died" ("...out on the highway to somewhere") and part of the hook of "Lucid Dreams" ("You left me falling and landing..."), but outside of that (piece of a) melody I'm not hearing much offhand.

If anything it just sounds like influence of that genre just leaked into this song, but who knows.

 

Exactly. Listening to both now and I guess it’s mildly similar but this isn’t a situation where you listen to one of these songs and immediately are reminded of the other.

 

I hope someone rips off my old bands riff for a banger. Doubtful, as they were on Pure Volume and MySpace, but hey... it’s a $15mil dream I suppose.

 

Hmmm. To win a case like this in California, Yellowcard will have to prove that Juice WRLD "had access" to their work (pretty easy), and the works are "substantially similar" (very hard). First the court will use an extrinsic test, i.e., "whether two works share a similarity of ideas and expression as measured by external, objective criteria." Also, not everything in an otherwise copyrighted work is protectable. Stuff that is considered "stock or standard pratice" in a genre is not protectable. I haven't read the complaint so I don't know exactly what Yellowcard is claiming (this stuff gets really granular and testimony from experts in music theory is usually required), but just from listening to the songs I'm going to guess they're claiming substantial melodic and rhythmic/phrasing similarities between Juice WRLD's chorus (1:09-1:55; 2:21-2:41) and Yellowcard's verse melody which is repeated throughout the song (0:01-0:50; 1:12-1:40; 2:46-3:06 (back vocals, left ear)). Just from listening I think Yellowcard will have a decent case of infringement. Though the lyrics are different, the melody and phrasing is (to me) quite similar (though not identical) just in those parts.

 

this is an absolute garbage thing to do

 

Yeah, I was prepared to agree with Yellowcard but hearing the songs...this is just petty as fuck.

 

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'd say they have a pretty strong case. The Juice WRLD chorus and the Yellowcard intro are extremely similar. Although not as noticeable in context because of the style of the songs, if someone were to play both of these songs one after the other on an acoustic guitar and sing them for you, you'd notice undeniable similarities.

 

I guess the members of Yellowcard don't wanna get real jobs now that the band is over?

in any event there's like a 0% chance they invented that melody, but that Christian rapper did win that lawsuit against Katy Perry over even more nonsensical shit so they probably saw that and were like "fuck it let's go"

 

I went on Youtube to listen to both and a comment about the lawsuit has 2.7k likes and people are aggressively downvoting Holly lol. All the other album tracks are like 95% likes to dislikes, Holly is at like 50% now

 

This song has always reminded me of another song and it bugged me because I couldn't figure out what it sounded like but now I know. Thanks Yellowcard lol

 

Busch is a powerhouse. If he’s the one filing, it’s no joke.

 

Also a comment said Holly had 20k views nine months ago so they've had like 70k views on it the last day if anyone wondered about that haha.

 

Never understand why artists do this. Unless it’s directly taking money from their pockets, who gives a shit. Art is fluid. Real bad looks to YC on this one

 

These types of things are always muddy honestly. As it's been said, YC's verses and Juice WRLD's chorus share one distinct melody that's easily identifiable as being similar in its phrasing, but I don't know. It's a small piece of a melody and there's so much else going on in the song that it doesn't play a huge part in the overall presentation so regardless, this is kind of lame IMO.

Yeah, I generally default to the side of defending the artists unless it's perfectly clear they stole something or used an uncredited sample as a prominent piece of their song. That Katy Perry case was like someone suing over a chord progression.

 

Ooph. Cmon..

 

Isn't Ryan Key known to be a douchebag?