Ed Sheeran appears to have won a decisive, and final victory in the long running battle over the copyright of Thinking Out Loud and its alleged similarities to What’s Going On – the US Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to revive the court case, which had already been settled in Sheeran’s favour.
Sheeran has not commented on this latest development, but his co-writer on the track, Amy Wadge has told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the ruling is a “huge relief”.
“It’s been rolling news under my life for 10 years but, yes, it’s done,” she said. “The absolute truth is that song changed my life. I didn’t have a hit until I was 37 and that was the one. I was able to feel like I’d had a hit for a year and then all of a sudden it felt like the wolves were surrounding. It was incredibly frightening.”
The story of Thinking Out Loud is long and unwieldy. Sheeran and Wadge wrote it in 2014. It was a huge international hit, reaching Number One in the UK and scooping Song Of The Year at the 2016 Grammys. But in that same year, Ed Townsend who co-wrote Let’s Get It On, sued, claiming that Thinking Out Loud veered close enough to Marvin Gaye’s timeless classic to infringe its copyright.
Townsend’s suit was dismissed in 2017. But the drama was far from over. The following year Sheeran and Wadge were sued again by an organisation called Structure Asset Sales (SAS), a body set up by investment banker David Pullman which has a stake in Townsend’s copyright.
Sheeran accepted that the two songs share similar chord progressions but in court said that: “These chords are common building blocks which were used to create music long before ‘Let’s Get It On’ was written and will be used to create music long after we are all gone.”
A New York jury agreed and the case was dismissed in May 2023. SAS appealed and with a final appeal to the Supreme Court now dismissed, Sheeran and Wadge can finally breathe out. It’s a victory not just for themselves, but as Wadge has pointed out, for songwriters in general.
“There was this huge existential threat of what it meant for the world of songwriting I always felt the weight of that,” she told Today. “People would tell me that everyone was looking at this case and I knew that had (SAS) been successful it really would have caused a huge issue for creativity in general. It was a big responsibility.”
