Sound Judgement: Musicology in the Modern Music Business

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In the latest instalment of Downtown’s ongoing editorial series in collaboration with the Association for Electronic Music (AFEM), Sound Judgement: Musicology in the Modern Music Business, we explore the role of forensic musicology in today’s music industry.

The series will unpack issues ranging from derivative work clearances to copyright disputes and remix culture, offering insights into how musicology can help safeguard rights and empower creators.

The series is authored by Sarah Davis, Downtown Music Publishing’s Director of Global Client Services and the company’s In-House Forensic Musicologist. With a background in music performance, education, and a Master’s in Music Business from NYU, Sarah blends music theory expertise with real-world industry knowledge to provide support on everything from sample clearance to infringement risk.

Every so often, a high-profile copyright infringement case breaks out of the courtroom and into the business headlines. Most recently, the Ed Sheeran/Marvin Gaye lawsuit sparked debate about the Blurred Lines between influence and imitation – a conversation that’s been echoed in recent years with cases involving household names like Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, Katy Perry, and Led Zeppelin. As the volume of new music in the commercial marketplace continues to grow, so too will questions around creative originality and the need for clear, informed musical analysis. That’s where forensic musicology comes in.

Forensic musicology is all about analyzing musical works through an investigative lens. It examines melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics, and other musical elements to determine whether one piece may have borrowed creative material from another. It’s rarely clean cut. Context and nuance are all over the place. What existed before, what makes a song distinct, and how we compare musical elements can all help distinguish between homage and infringement. 

But musicology’s role isn’t limited to courtrooms. It can also serve as a powerful tool to help creatives and rights holders avoid issues before they come up. 

As Director of Global Client Services and Downtown’s In-House Musicologist, I work closely with our publishing, label, and artist services teams on everything from sample and interpolation clearance, to pre-release reviews, to providing expert opinion on highly publicized disputes. At its core, my role is about providing an informed perspective that helps creators and their teams make better decisions. This includes navigating the nuances between sampling, which is using a portion of the original master recording (and in turn its underlying composition), and interpolation, which recreates a portion of a song (could be melody, lyric, etc.) without directly lifting from a preexisting master. 

In this series, I’ll unpack the role musicology plays across today’s creative and commercial landscape and explore how Downtown applies this work day-to-day especially in cases involving sampling and interpolation, as well as how musicology offers critical support in genres like electronic music, where remixes, mashups, and references are commonplace.

But first, it’s worth understanding what musicology really is: a bridge between the creative and the legal, between inspiration and ownership. At Downtown, that means not only helping creators express themselves, but also helping them protect that expression, too.

This is what musicology looks like in the modern music business.