Made of Steal

Plagiarism – intended or unintended – is quite common in Heavy Metal music. This project aims to find as many similarities between songs as possible and store them in a list.

I am not against diving into other genres of music. If it gets too much I’ll just split the list into smaller ones by genre.

The list

The current list is here. It features one item for each riff or melody that has been plagiarised. At the top level, there is the “original” song – usually the oldest one. Below there is a list of perceived plagiarisms, each with a similarity rating. Moreover, we provide a way to listen to it, usually a Youtube video with a timestamp.

Contribution

Contributions from the community are very welcome! Just create a pull request for list.yml. Be sure to add new riffs/melodies at the end of the file. More often than you think a melody is “reused” multiple times. So please have a look if one of your songs is already in the list. If that’s the case, please add the other song at the appropriate place.

All submissions must follow this Yaml format:

- artist: band
  song: song title
  position: timestamp, preferrably with Youtube link
  plagiarisms:
    - artist: band
      song: song title
      position: timestamp, preferrably with Youtube link
      similarity: 0, 1, or 2

If there are multiple songs borrowing from this melody/riff, add each as a separate list item under plagiarisms. The similarity is a rating of how close the perceived plagiarism is to the original song.

• A 2 means (almost) identical and should be an objective measure.
• A 1 means not identical, but pretty similar (maybe a few notes are changed or missing).
• A 0 means not a direct copy, but you can still feel the other song.

Obviously, the difference between 1 and 0 is subjective and may be up for discussion.

Please use ”original artist inspired plagiarising artist(s)” as the commit message.

If you find a technical error in the list (e.g., plagiarisms of the same melody/riff are split between multiple items), please create a pull request as well.

If you disagree with some similarity rating, please create an issue.

License

CC0