Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
Shape Of You song-theft court case concludes
completemusicupdate.comThe ‘Shape Of You’ song-theft court case has now concluded with judge Antony Zacaroli busy considering whether or not Ed Sheeran is indeed a musical magpie and squirrel, who likes lifting elements of other people’s songs when making his music.
Or, at least, who lifted a key line from the 2015 track ‘Oh Why’ when he wrote his 2017 hit ‘Shape Of You’.Sami Chokri reckons that Sheeran got a copy of his track ‘Oh Why’ through mutual friends or industry connections and then, when the star and his songwriting pals got together in late 2016 to write ‘Shape Of You’, he either consciously or subconsciously utilised a key element of the earlier song within his hit.But Sheeran and his collaborators deny having ever heard ‘Oh Why’ before writing ‘Shape Of You’.
Meanwhile, they argue, the elements that are shared by the two songs are pretty commonplace in pop music, which means it’s not entirely unlikely that two separate songwriters would separately write songs that sound similar in that way.This week legal reps for the two sides – Ian Mill for Sheeran et al and Andrew Sutcliffe for Chokri – delivered their closing arguments, honing in on the two key aspects of any song-theft case.
First, are ‘Oh Why’ and ‘Shape Of You’ sufficiently similar to suggest copying and constitute copyright infringement? And second, did Sheeran hear ‘Oh Why’ before writing his song?For Sutcliffe, of course, the answer to both those questions is “fuck yeah!”, to use the legal term.
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