According to documents from RCA Records seen by Billboard magazine, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ megahit Uptown Funk has had five more composers added to its writing credit, including Charlie, Robert and Ronnie Wilson of The Gap Band.
The Wilson brothers, along with keyboardist Rudolph Taylor and producer Lonnie Simmons, bring Uptown Funk‘s songwriters to a grand total of eleven. The additional credits come after a legal claim that a section of the song is based on the Gap Band’s 1980 hit Oops Upside Your Head.
The decision comes shortly after Marvin Gaye’s family were awarded $7.4 million after it was adjudged that Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines plagiarised Gaye’s Got To Give It Up and Tom Petty was given a writing credit on Sam Smith’s Stay With Me due to its similarity to Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. After the Blurred Lines decision, co-writer Pharrell Williams claimed that a dangerous precedent was being set for the music business; this latest decision suggests he could be right.
