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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that the Maroon 5 reps approached Primary Wave pre-emptively as they knew the melody was too close to a Bob Marley classic.

A band that might have really benefited from this approach would be The Verve in the UK. "Bittersweet Symphony" in 1997 was a worldwide hit, but they made £0 from it as the majority of royalties had to be paid to the Rolling Stones' label as the iconic melody was a rework of 1965's "The Last Time".

In 2019, Jagger and Richards gave the publishing royalty rights back the Verve -- 11 years after the band broke up.

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The Verve did preemptively approach the rights holders for The Last Time, but having cleared the sample they were then accused of lifting elements of the vocal melody and gave up the rights to get the song released.

Ironically there's barely any audible similarity to the original Stones recording, which the Stones freely acknowledge borrowed heavily from an earlier gospel song

This was because of Allan Klein who basically shafted the Stones and got the rights to most of their 60s output until his death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony https://andrewgoutman.com/rolling-stones-allen-klein-battle/

so when he died Jagger and Richards gave the publishing rights back.

Every few years this thing comes up and people make it sound like The Stones screwed over the Verve and then someone comes along and clarifies the issue but for some reason the next time it comes back up it is still the same confusion.

Bittersweet Symphony was a little different because it was a straight sample, they looped a recording of a Stones song. This Primary Wave company is buying up publishing rights and because of some IMO bad court decisions can claim to own the melodies themselves, not just the recordings. The problem with that is every melody ever sung sounds like some other melody, somewhere.

Thanks for the Wikipedia rabbit hole you sent me down.

I'm emerging with a fact check: the strings in Bittersweet Symphony were in point of fact a heavily reworked sample of a hook contained in an obscure 1960's symphonic version of "The Last Time". The hook and its melody does not appear anywhere in the Stones' original version.

Everyone eventually agreed The Verve got shafted and Jagger/Richards in the end showed magnanimity and moved to grant The Verve rights to the song.

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