🎵 Ed Sheeran Threatens to Quit Music

Plus, why rappers age like fine wine. YouTube makeup artist turned metal extraordinaire.

Mic-Check Newsletter
8 min readMay 24, 2023

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Ed Sheeran spent late April and early May inside a New York courthouse, where he was defending himself against copyright infringement accusations from the estate of the co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On. The plaintiffs argued that Sheeran’s 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud plagiarized Let’s Get It On, as evidenced by their similar tempos, common grooves, and most importantly, a I-iii-IV-V chord sequence. The defense argued that these similarities are building blocks of songwriting that all musicians are entitled to use. They cited Axis of Awesome’s comedy song Four Chords as proof that an innumerable number of songs share the same fundamentals.

A guilty verdict from the court would’ve had a cataclysmic impact on the music industry. The ramifications would’ve been so destructive that Sheeran announced he would quit music entirely if he was…

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