Ben Schwag: what’s in a song title?
Ben Schwag: what’s in a song title?
As musicians, we all like to think we have something special. But check any Spotify playlist and you’re sure to find identical song titles to yours. Lots of them.
Song titles can sometimes be an issue. I remember debates over a track of mine when the main co-writer thought Where Did Our Love Go was too generic. Can’t argue with that – but it’s the chorus, dude.
Producer Ben Schwag laughs it off. Over the years, he has worked with legends such as Johnny Guitar Watson, Sly Stone and more recently ace French freestyle rapper M’Tiss. So he has seen a lot of songs.
Going over old material on YouTube, he thought he had come across a cover of his with What-cha Gonna Do. He had written a song with the same title in the eighties. “Same sentiment, same stupid spelling; how unlikely is that?”
The timing was off, though. “The track was released when I was 10 years old,” he notes. “So some writer had the same idea way before me without me knowing it until now.”
Sweet, soulful music
Inevitably, it’s a completely different track. Gale Garnett‘s version is a sweet, soulful pop song from 1964. Schwag’s song is a pushy funk. “It wasn’t based on the lyrics anyway,” he remembers. “I had this great bassline and took it from there. It could have been something completely different.”
What about today? Do titles actually matter? The lyricist in me says “Yes, very much”. I’d argue that chroruses – and therfore the song title – have never been more important. But with over 100,000 tracks being released PER DAY you can forget trying to be original or unique.
Is it worth calling lawyers for a song title? According to Schwag, the answer is a categoric, “no”. You can’t copyright a title anyway. Just stay away from Hey Jude and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and you should be OK 😉
Oh and remember to get and use those ISRC codes. Sad to say, it’s the only way to show a song is actually yours these days.