'Same That Tune' For Musical Déjà Vu

This past June, Steven Nathanson pulled out of his driveway, flipped on the radio in his car and slammed on the brakes.

He didn’t have to hear more than three bars.

“That’s ‘Got to Give It Up,’ by Marvin Gaye,” he thought, driving away from his home in Montclair, New Jersey. But then Robin Thicke’s falsetto crooning piped in through his speakers, kicking off the hit of the summer, “Blurred Lines.”

When Mr. Nathanson posted this revelation on his start-up song comparison website, “Same That Tune,” he realized he wasn’t the only one who heard it—from the similar cowbell, vintage-sounding snare and keys to the studio chatter, ad libs and straight-up groove.

To date, that particular post about the similarities between Gaye’s song and “Blurred Lines” has 594 shares on Facebook. And that is just one example out of hundreds.

“When a song becomes really successful, it’s typically because it reminds us of something else,” Mr. Nathanson explained last week during a telephone interview. “I think most audiences don’t have an appetite for something that is completely original. If it’s too similar, though, people get very upset or very outspoken about it.”

Same That Tune is an outlet to vent and discuss, according to the musician and engineer behind Further Lane Productions—named for the Brooklyn native’s childhood summers spent biking up and down the East Hampton street. However, it is not a place to bash, he emphasized.

So far, the site has drawn 44,000 unique visitors—two dozen of whom regularly submit comparisons, Mr. Nathanson said, though he posts the vast majority. He’s had an ear for tunes since he was very young, he said. His fascination with musical hooks grew when he was wailing on drums in high school bands, much to the dismay of his fellow musicians, he said.

“It would annoy them,” he laughed. “They’d be like, ‘What do you think of this song?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s good, but it sounds just like this,’ and name another song. I’ve always had that ability, to pull out a tune or a rhythm. It didn’t necessarily endear me to them.”

Popular music is destined to repeat common themes, according to Mr. Nathanson. It’s the artist’s ability to synthesize different pieces that separates the geniuses from the imitators. That’s why Same That Tune is able to exist, he said.

“Part of what expands music is this post-modern sensibility of, ‘I can borrow a little bit of this and a little bit of that,’” he said. “When an artist is able to do that, that’s what makes them original, so to speak, leaving people thinking, ‘This sounds really familiar. I don’t know what it is.’”

Any submission to Same That Tune is a three-step process, he said. First, the user logs in through Facebook, Twitter or the website itself and posts the original song with a music video from YouTube. The second song follows suit. Then, the user can draw comparisons by music genre, song similarity—44 options in total, among them chord change/progression, bass line, melody and production—and additional notes and observations.

Then, it’s up for public vote.

Each posting can be placed into one of four categories. Non-existent is the least offensive—the original song and the second song sound nothing alike, Mr. Nathanson said—followed by Coincidental, where the two songs may share musical influences and instrumentation, such as “Home” by Dream Theater versus “Royals” by Lorde.

Next in line is Tribute, where the second song intentionally honors or references the original, as did Robin Thicke with “Blurred Lines,” and One Direction did with two of their biggest hits. “Live While We’re Young” clearly cites “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by The Clash, and the intro to “What Makes You Beautiful” appears to pay homage to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” often mistakenly called “Teenage Wasteland.” That song was released in November 1971, roughly 20 years before One Direction’s members were born.

“Most of their songs, they knowingly say, ‘These guys are influences, our heroes and idols. We’ll, literally, do two seconds of it in a cheeky way,’” Mr. Nathanson said of One Direction. “They’re not trying to hide it within a verse somewhere. They put it right at the front of the song. It’s in such a way that they haven’t tried to change the key and tempo, or mask it underneath a lot of production.”

The same can’t be said of the songs falling under the Dubious category, where the second song is highly derivative of the original.

“If there is a negative association with any of them, Dubious would be the worst,” Mr. Nathanson said. “There’s a question of, ‘This one’s so close, there’s something suspect about it. There has to be a reason it sounds like the original.’”

For example, the verse melody for British pianist/composer Joe Jackson’s 1982 release, “Breaking Us In Two,” is nearly identical to the intro/verse melody for Badfinger’s 1971 hit “Day After Day,” he said. Musically, the first five notes of both melodies follow the same pattern, albeit a half step apart.

Or, in 1972, Brazilian artist Jorge Ben released his composition “Taj Mahal.” Six years later, Rod Stewart dropped his disco hit “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” leading Mr. Ben to claim infringement of his song and filed a lawsuit. The vocal and chorus melodies are eerily similar.

In 2012, Mr. Stewart addressed the similarities between the songs.

“Not that I’d stood in the studio and said, ‘Here, I know, we’ll use that tune from ‘Taj Mahal’ as the chorus. The writer lives in Brazil, so he’ll never find out,’” he wrote in “Rod: The Autobiography.” “Clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple.”

The lawsuit was settled by Mr. Stewart agreeing to donate all of the royalties for “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” to the United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF. But not all conflicts, such as these, are resolved so easily.

In October, Marvin Gaye’s estate fired back at Robin Thicke’s preemptive lawsuit—filed in August—that sued the legend’s estate following plagiarism complaints. Now, the soul icon’s family has filed a countersuit against Thicke, claiming that he ripped off two additional songs.

The war is far from over.

“Robin Thicke gave an interview and he was explicit about wanting to come up with something that had Marvin Gaye’s vibe,” Mr. Nathanson said. “I think people get upset when something copies something else, but doesn’t veer far enough way from it. It’s not an intentional thing or an evil thing, in many cases. That’s part of the criteria for gaining that popularity: sounding like someone else.”

To post a comparison, visit samethattune.com.