Ed Sheeran is not having a good year.
In June, songwriters Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard filed a $20 million lawsuit against Sheeran, claiming that the British pop star copied their song Amazing almost note-for-note in his 2014 hit Photograph.
On Tuesday, Sheeran was again sued for copyright infringement, this time for his hit single Thinking Out Loud.
The suit was filed by heirs of Ed Townsend, who wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics to Marvin Gaye’s romantic anthem, Let’s Get it On. It claims Sheeran copied major aspects of Let’s Get it On for Thinking Out Loud.
“The Defendants copied the ‘heart’ of Let’s and repeated it continuously throughout Thinking,” the lawsuit said. “The melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic compositions of Thinking are substantially and/or strikingly similar to the drum composition of Let’s.”
This might not shock everyone. Comparisons have frequently been drawn between the tunes.
In March 2015, a Los Angeles jury decreed that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams owed Marvin Gaye’s estate $7.3 million for copying the feel of Gaye’s 1977 hit Got to Give It Up. The next day, Spin published an article titled, “Blurred Lines Isn’t Even the Biggest Marvin Gaye Ripoff This Decade.”
In it, Andrew Unterberger wrote: Thinking Out Loud is a very nice ballad, one whose seductive groove, sentimental lyric and full-hearted vocal has taken it all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Songs chart. It is also an incredibly obvious successor to Marvin Gaye’s 1973 superlative slow jam Let’s Get It On.