That Came In Like A Wrecking Ball - Miley Cyrus Being Sued Over ‘Flowers’

Miley Cyrus’ breakup anthem Flowers was an instant hit, especially among women. The message of the song is this, in so many words: You can love yourself better than someone else can. Loving yourself is a familiar concept in pop culture. Ask RuPaul or Whitney Houston.

However.

The songstress is now being sued over that piece of work, due to some… undeniable similarities between Flowers and Bruno Mars’ hit 2013 song When I Was Your Man. If you’re going to lose rights to your own work, it seems appropriate to have the artist who croons our favorite break-up ballads be the power behind that loss, right?

Too bad Mars has absolutely nothing to do with this particular legal tangle.

Turns out that When I Was Your Man is partially owned by Tempo Music Investments, a music investment company that buys the rights to music catalogs, collects royalties on the music in those catalogs, and focuses on the long-term financial value of popular songs— and they’re none too pleased with the resemblance of Flowers to a song that they own, and are actively being paid for.

Bruno Mars? He’s still too busy with his own projects to make a fuss. None of this legal tangle is of his doing. He isn’t even a plaintiff in this case, just the investment firm that owns part of his catalog of songs. To anyone who came here hungry for beef: Sorry.

Is it weird that bodies of art are being treated as financial assets for someone other than the artist who created them?

Yeah, wee bit. But it’s legal, so one supposes that the two Grammy awards Cyrus won for her work on Flowers don’t mean much.

Jokes aside, what does this mean for Miley Cyrus? Well, if the law sides in favor of Tempo Music Investments, she could be banned from performing the song live, or be forced to pay the investment firm quite a large chunk of change— which would really affect her ability to do all the lovely things for herself that she sings about in her song. Ironic.

But beyond whatever it is that Cyrus has to handle, this case has the potential to set a precedent for copyright infringement in pop music that feels yucky. Composers have always stolen from other composers. Olivia Rodrigo’s work is influenced by Taylor Swift’s. Chappell Roan cites Stevie Nicks and Karen Carpenter as influencing her work. Like certain chord progressions and the Millennial Whoop , some things are just conventions of a genre.

But going back into the centuries… Brahms was influenced by the music of Beethoven, who was influenced by the music of Mozart, who was influenced by the music of Bach, who was influenced by Vivaldi.

Music begets music. That’s how the world has worked since the first paleolithic human tapped two sticks together and made a beat instead of a spark.

However, this isn’t the first time that musicians have been taken to court for not being quite original enough. Ed Sheeran , Led Zeppelin, and Katy Perry are just a few musicians who have had to duke it out in legal proceedings for the right to profit— or even just own— their own work.

There are 12 notes in the chromatic scale. If someone else publicizes that they’ve put them together in a certain order before you, better lawyer up, apparently.

Even if the artist you’ve “offended” isn’t actually offended.