And yet, somewhere in the music industry, there's almost certainly a lawyer preparing to argue that a particular combination belongs exclusively to somebody else.
Welcome to modern songwriting, where inspiration is encouraged, influence is celebrated, and accidentally sounding like somebody who came before you could land you in court.
The latest artist to find herself in the middle of this increasingly ridiculous situation is Olivia Rodrigo, or OliRod as we call here at RTL Today Radio.
Her new festive single, Take Me Home (4 Christmas), has been said to have more than a passing resemblance the 1981 track from The Waitresses, ‘Christmas Wrapping’.
According to NME, the band's guitarist and songwriter, Christoher Butler has been in contact with OliRod's team. “About two months ago, I received a weird email from someone claiming to be “Olivia Rodrigo”. It was filled w/ Waitresses gush, and just had to be fake,” he wrote on social media. “Said she’d written a Christmas song, and invited me to hear it. I didn’t know who OR was, so I did a deep dig. Wow…what a career.”
The NME article goes on to report that Butler was not at all bothered by it and should that not be the default setting we adopt anyway. “Thank you all for the comparisons to ‘Christmas Wrapping’. The vibe is there, but no plagiarism—and this is from the guy who wrote ‘CW’,” he wrote in one comment.
The track has also prompted comparisons with Robbie Williams' 2012 hit Candy. Listeners spotted similarities, the internet did what the internet does, and suddenly another perfectly ordinary musical resemblance was being discussed in the language of plagiarism.
Except this time, something rather refreshing happened.
Robbie Williams couldn't have cared less.
In a gloriously blunt Instagram response, Williams acknowledged that he could hear similarities between the songs, but made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of pursuing Rodrigo.
He went further, questioning an industry increasingly willing to treat a familiar melody, rhythm or musical idea as an opportunity for litigation.
"Most of it, I think, is complete bollocks," he wrote of the accusations.
And he's got a point.
Now Robbie isn't getting into the sticky weeds of suggesting that copyright should be abolished or that artists should be free to help themselves to other people's work. Quite the opposite. He acknowledged that genuine theft exists, that artists deserve protection, and that not everyone is financially secure enough to shrug off the misuse of their material.
But he also recognised something that seems to get lost whenever another plagiarism controversy makes the headlines. And this happening more and more often.
Music doesn't exist in isolation. It never has.
Every musician is the product of everything they've heard, absorbed, admired, disliked, studied or unconsciously remembered.
The Beatles borrowed from American rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Led Zeppelin drew heavily from the blues tradition. Punk took the raw materials of garage rock and stripped them back. Hip-hop was built, in part, on the extraordinary creative possibilities of sampling and recontextualising existing recordings.
None of this makes those movements worthless or unoriginal. It demonstrates how music develops.
Of course, some of those borrowings also led to legitimate disputes over credit and compensation. Influence isn't a universal defence for copying, and the history of popular music includes plenty of artists who were denied the recognition and royalties they deserved.
But there's a difference between taking somebody else's work and arriving at a similar idea.
And that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
Should Radiohead be concerned that Balu Brigada's piano line in BedHead is a wee bit like theirs in All I Need from In Rainbows.
Or picture Coldplay all flustered and on the blower to Claims Direct over Friendly Fires' Magnetic cosying up to Adventure of a Lifetime (have a listen and tell me it is any different).
Few musicians understand the consequences better than Ed Sheeran (who has enough on his plate right now than getting drawn into another social media bin fire).
In 2023, Sheeran successfully defended himself against allegations that Thinking Out Loud infringed the copyright of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, written with Ed Townsend.
The songs shared certain musical characteristics, particularly in their harmonic structure and rhythmic feel. But the jury concluded that Sheeran had independently created his song.
A separate copyright claim involving the same two compositions was subsequently dismissed, with that decision upheld on appeal in 2024. The court recognised that commonplace musical building blocks cannot simply become the exclusive property of one songwriter.
And that's crucial.
Because if we start allowing ownership of familiar chord progressions, common rhythmic patterns or broad musical styles, we're not protecting creativity. We're restricting the materials from which creativity is made.
Imagine telling a painter that a particular combination of blue and yellow had already been used, and therefore couldn't appear in another painting.
Or informing a novelist that a story about two people falling in love was suspiciously similar to one written fifty years earlier - I mean, if they drink poison and are called the Contagues and The Mapulets, then there's ground to bite your thumb.
But one would hope we'd recognise the absurdity immediately.
Yet music seems increasingly vulnerable to precisely this sort of thinking.
And it's not as though the problem is limited to established stars.
A young songwriter working in a bedroom has access to the same basic musical vocabulary as someone with twenty platinum albums. They may also have absorbed thousands of songs without consciously remembering where particular ideas originated.
A melody emerges. It feels natural. It sounds good. They develop it into something personal.
How exactly are they supposed to prove that somewhere, at some point in their lives, they didn't hear something vaguely similar?
The burden of that uncertainty can be enormous, particularly when the person raising the objection has the resources to make defending a song prohibitively expensive.
The controversy surrounding Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams' Blurred Lines remains one of the most troubling examples.
In 2015, a jury found that the song infringed copyright associated with Marvin Gaye's Got to Give It Up. The resulting financial consequences were substantial.
Supporters of the decision saw it as a necessary victory for the protection of an artist's work.
Critics feared something rather different: that the judgment risked extending copyright protection beyond specific musical expression and into the territory of style, atmosphere and feel.
And there's the danger.
A musical style isn't a finite object. A groove isn't necessarily an invention. A genre is a shared language, developed by countless musicians across generations.
If every new song must be sufficiently different from everything that preceded it, where does that leave the very idea of musical tradition?
It also raises a rather uncomfortable question.
Would some of the greatest songs ever written survive the level of forensic scrutiny we're now applying to contemporary pop music?
Probably not without somebody spotting a familiar phrase, a similar progression or a rhythmic pattern that appeared on a record released in 1967.
Rodrigo is hardly a stranger to these conversations.
Her earlier work attracted comparisons with Paramore and Taylor Swift, resulting in additional songwriting credits on Good 4 U and Deja Vu.
Her song Brutal was also compared with Elvis Costello's Pump It Up.
Costello's reaction was wonderfully straightforward. He wasn't interested in turning the resemblance into a grievance. As he pointed out at the time, borrowing and building on what came before is part of how rock and roll works.
There's an important distinction here. Rodrigo's previous credit arrangements don't establish that every comparison amounted to proven plagiarism. Nor does the absence of a lawsuit automatically mean that a similarity is insignificant.
But what these episodes demonstrate is how quickly the conversation can shift from musical influence to accusations of wrongdoing.
And in the latest case, there's another telling detail.
Rodrigo's Christmas single was also compared with The Waitresses' Christmas Wrapping. Yet Christopher Butler, who wrote that song, welcomed the connection. Rodrigo had contacted him, expressed her admiration and played him the new material.
Butler regarded the result as an homage rather than theft.
Two established musicians, Williams and Butler, hearing echoes of their own work in a younger artist's song and responding not with outrage, but with generosity.
Imagine that.
The demand for absolute originality is particularly strange when you consider how popular music actually works.
Look at Stella Lefty, each of her biggest songs are now tarnished with the 'lazy plagiarism' tag, and that could effect the singer's confidence and credibility.
We have genres precisely because songs share characteristics.
A blues song sounds like the blues because it follows certain conventions. A punk record sounds like punk because it uses recognisable musical ideas. Dance music relies on rhythmic patterns that have been repeated, refined and reinvented for decades.
Listeners don't generally complain that every new house track contains a four-on-the-floor beat.
Nor do we accuse every guitarist who uses a twelve-bar blues progression of stealing from the musicians who popularised it.
We understand that these are building blocks.
What makes a song distinctive is often what the artist does with those blocks: the phrasing, the performance, the lyrics, the production, the arrangement, the personality.
Sometimes the difference is enormous. Sometimes it's subtle.
And sometimes, entirely independently, two people arrive at something remarkably similar.
Take our very own Eva Marija's Eurovsion Song Contest entry, Mother Nature and the online caterwauling of 'one sequence of notes sounds like Birdy'. More specifically Birdy's Keeping Your Head Up.
Yes, you can recognise a resemblance, an echo of a chord. But was it intentional?
How much did it play a part in Mother Nature under-performing at the Eurovision Finals (we love it here)? Did it distract Eva from her goals and delivery.
How much did it mean to Birdy, who herself became a household name on the back of licensed copying by way of some brilliant covers (Cherry Ghost, Bon Iver)?
That's not necessarily evidence of dishonesty. It's a predictable consequence of millions of musicians working within a shared musical language.
None of which means that genuine plagiarism should be tolerated.
If somebody deliberately lifts a distinctive melody, copies a substantial part of a composition, or uses a protected recording without the necessary permission, the original creators have every right to defend their work.
Intellectual property matters. Songwriters deserve recognition and payment. And the history of music is littered with examples of people whose contributions were exploited by those with more money, influence or commercial power.
But the purpose of copyright should be to protect creative expression, not to give anyone ownership over inspiration itself.
The distinction can be difficult. Accidental copying can still raise legitimate copyright questions, and proving intent isn't always necessary to establish infringement.
That's precisely why the law needs to be applied carefully, with proper attention to what is genuinely original and protectable, rather than simply whether two songs remind us of one another.
Perhaps the greatest danger isn't the occasional high-profile court case.
It's what happens before a song is even released.
The artist who abandons a perfectly good chorus because it reminds somebody of an old hit.
The producer who changes an arrangement, not because the alternative sounds better, but because it feels legally safer.
The songwriter who begins second-guessing every instinct, wondering whether a melody that arrived naturally might already exist somewhere in the vast history of recorded music.
That isn't a particularly healthy environment for creativity.
And it's certainly not how great music is made.
Again, we recall the case of Ed Sheeran, this time admitting that Shape Of You does indeed sound similar to the Blackstreet mega smash Do Diggity, but maintains that it is simply a coincidence. Royalties on that song were apparently frozen while a resolution was found.
Sheeran said it uses “a basic minor pentatonic pattern” which is “entirely commonplace”.
The singer had already given the writers behind TLC’s 90s hit No Scrubs a credit on Shape of You after comparisons were made between the two songs. And his lawyer had to state that they rejected the notion "that he is a ‘magpie’ who habitually deliberately copies and conceals the work of other songwriters.”
Robbie Williams is in a fortunate position. He has the career, the catalogue and the financial security to look at a song that resembles one of his own and decide it simply isn't worth pursuing.
He acknowledged that privilege himself.
But his wider point deserves attention far beyond this particular controversy.
We should be encouraging musicians to listen, absorb, experiment and create. We should celebrate the connections between generations, the way musical ideas travel, and the extraordinary things that happen when familiar ingredients are combined in unfamiliar ways.
And yes, when someone genuinely steals another artist's work, there should be consequences.
But a resemblance isn't automatically a robbery.
A familiar melody isn't necessarily a confession.
And originality shouldn't mean pretending that everything which came before never existed.
After all, the chances are that the next song you fall in love with will remind you, at least a little, of something you've heard before.
That doesn't necessarily make it a copy.
It might just make it music.
