Good evening,
I’ve been composing my own rebetiko pieces, mainly melodies, for quite some time now, but I have a concern: I’m worried that one or more of my melodies may already exist without my knowing it, and I don’t want to “steal” from other composers. How could I find out whether a melody already exists?
If you didn’t do it consciously, don’t worry about it. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and we all have our influences and the things we’ve listened to.
I know that, but I can’t have a clear conscience knowing that I might pass off someone else’s work as my own.
At worst, you might have to sort things out between yourselves — you and someone you believe you happened to copy unintentionally, and whom you don’t even know yet. One suggestion: upload your tracks to gt. Make it clear that you created them and that, if there happens to be some similarity between the musical phrases and a piece by another creator, you didn’t copy it — it was just a coincidence. In the (very unlikely, at least in my opinion) event that someone comes along and says, “But this is mine — look, I first uploaded it here, at such-and-such a time, etc., etc.,” and it really is exactly like what you created, or bears a very strong resemblance to it, you can simply and amicably say, “Oh, that’s wonderful — well done, I had no idea! I’ll withdraw mine,” and then there’s no harm done. But I don’t think anything like that will happen…
Hmm, on YouTube, is there a chance that some rights management company could automatically come along and demand a cut? It’s happened to composers, even in cases where the tracks didn’t sound all that similar…
Hmm, the question is how willing the managers of such a company are to demand whatever percentages they may be entitled to, and how much money and effort they are prepared to spend to secure them…
They won’t get you into trouble. It’s happened to me. Not with tracks I thought were my own, but with old tracks that someone had already uploaded — possibly in a different version where YouTube recognised the melody — and I received a notification before the upload had finished saying that it already existed, and that the creator or company had no objection to me uploading it (they might object at other times, depending on what each person declares, but that hasn’t happened to me so far), but if I started making money from the upload, it might go straight into their pocket, bypassing mine.
In the meantime, we’re talking about tracks I was hardly likely to make money from. They’re such outsiders that there’s no chance of adverts being placed on them — I think adverts are where YouTubers’ income comes from.
So the benefit will be that you’ll find out who wrote your song before you did!
I assume, of course, @Mantos, that you’re probably suspecting a match with old tracks, not modern ones.
Usually, large companies have an equally large company, for example Orpheum, oversee their intellectual property, so they don’t sit down and deal with each individual case. As Pericles said, you receive a notification and act accordingly. The question is who ultimately owns the authorship, who we think it belongs to, and ultimately where this thing begins and ends (in terms of the similarity of musical phrases, how repetitive they are, etc.). Here—it’s been reposted on the forum—there’s an enlightening talk.https://youtu.be/55utUMyi8Fs?is=V_eO4VRIMEgGW2HP