Robbie Williams says he won’t sue Olivia Rodrigo after some fans claimed her holiday track “Take Me Home (4 Christmas) sounds like his song “Candy,” and that he thinks such lawsuits are “disgusting” and “complete bollocks.”
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Social media users have heavily speculated that Olivia’s Christmas song, released Nov. 5, somehow ripped off Robbie’s 2012 hit. But in a lengthy Instagram post Monday (Nov. 9), Williams defended the “Good 4 U” singer, called her “f–king brilliant” and blasted the idea that he might sue her.
“It sounds to me as though she may have accidentally stumbled across a musical echo of mine in one of her new songs. And do you know what? I couldn’t care less,” Williams said. “I’m not going after her. Because I think at some point, some f–king sanity has to prevail.”
The British singer went even further, broadly criticizing the rush to accuse pop artists of copying earlier songs. Williams wrote that there are “only so many notes” and that all artists “all stand on the shoulders of people who came before us.”
“Artists deserve to be protected. But there’s a difference between protecting your work and treating every vaguely familiar sequence of notes as a winning lottery ticket,” Williams said. “Some of this stuff has become ambulance chasing. And I think it’s disgusting.”
Williams is hardly the first pop star to express that sentiment. Ed Sheeran, who faced several high profile lawsuits, once noted there are “very few chords used in pop music.” Charlie Puth defended Taylor Swift when she faced scrutiny over tracks on her The Life of a Showgirl album, saying in a TikTok that there are “bound to be similarities” to something that came before.
“Coincidental similarity between short bits of melody is way more common than people think it is,” Joe Bennett, a veteran forensic musicologist, told Billboard in September. “And songwriters simply being out of ideas and plagiarizing each other is way less common than people think it is.”
The frenzy over Rodrigo is likely driven by her own previous encounters with allegations of copying on her breakout 2021 album Sour.
In July 2021, she retroactively added the trio of Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent as songwriters on “Deja Vu” over similarities to Swift’s Lover track “Cruel Summer.” Months later, she gave Paramore‘s Hayley Williams a similar added credit on “Good 4 U” after fans heard similarities to the pop punk band’s “Misery Business.” Fans also claimed similarities between her “Brutal” and Elvis Costello‘s 1978 hit “Pump It Up,” but the rock legend later told a fan on X, “This is fine by me … It’s how rock and roll works.”
Breakout singer Stella Lefty has been dogged by similar criticism this year after she added a songwriting credit for Noah Kahan on her viral hit “Boston” after his team reached out to say they “think this sounds similar” to his megahit “Stick Season.”
But similarity only becomes infringement when a song directly copies elements of an existing song that are covered by copyright law. That scenario arises far less than fans think, experts say, and many pop songs overlap simply by coincidence because they share basic chord progressions or unprotected genre tropes.
Facing internet sleuths comparing his song to Rodrigo’s, that’s the message that Williams tried to send in Monday’s post. By mid-Monday morning, his statement had been liked more than 64,000 times — including by Stella Lefty herself.
“Music has been around for a very long time. We’re all going to bump into each other eventually,” Williams added in his Instagram post. “That’s how music works. If we keep punishing people for accidentally arriving somewhere somebody else has already been, eventually we’re going to frighten the creativity out of everyone.”
See his message in full below:
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