Did Flash Steal The Walking Dead Theme Song

Seems everyone is copying their music from someone else these days. Robin Thicke is in court defending his song Blurred Lines against allegations that it’s just a rip off of Marvin Gaye. Madonna is concerned that Lady Gaga’s Born This Way was a little too close to Express Yourself. Post Modern Jukebox gets copied by artists on the Voice UK. Where is the line between artistic expression and plagiarism.

This week I noticed another similarity between two theme songs.

New spinoff from Arrow for the 2014-2015 show The Flash has a remarkably similar theme song to The Walking Dead. The biggest difference is the tempo, but the signature string melody is very similar.

Here, listen for yourself:

What’s going on here? Was the composer for The Flash inspired by The Walking Dead?

Both series are based on comic books, but from different studios, so it seems unlikely that this would be some kind of backroom deal. If not, DC Comics, The Flash and the CW may be in trouble with AMC and Robert Kirkman…

YouTube sued by ‘indie’ music publisher?

Read this article today about YouTube’s defense of the lawsuit brought by Viacom and other copyright holders.

One thing that caught my eye was

…lawsuits brought against YouTube by Viacom International Inc., England’s top soccer league — The Football Association Premier League Ltd. — and indie music publisher Bourne Co.

I thought to myself, “Wow, an Indie music publisher is suing YouTube?”. So I decided to do some research.

First, for those of you not really acquainted with the indie music and film scene, there is a certain connotation that goes along with the term indie (short for independant).

Wikipedia defines indie like this:

The term indie is short for “independent” and refers to artistic creations outside the commercial mainstream, without the support of a major record label, major movie studio, or other source of a large budget.

So, I did some research on this so called indie music publisher, Bourne Co.

BOURNE CO., one of the largest independent international music publishers, has since its founding in 1919, never lost its passion for the art of song writing or its deep respect for the creative processes involved in that art

So, they are one of the largest publishers of sheet music in the world. In this context, independant means ‘privately owned’, not ‘outside the commercial mainstream’. It really sounds to me like either the author of the article, Viacom or the AP is trying to spin this and make it sound like indie musicians are against YouTube, and that is just not the case. In reality it’s just a bunch of large companies (Viacom, Bourne Co., Football Association Premier League) angry because YouTube is making money off content they ‘own’. In reality, these publishers should be suing the individuals that actually post the copyrighted content to YouTube, but as the RIAA has shown us, that’s not a great PR move.