song: Million Years Ago
artist: Adele
album: 25 (2015)
writers: Adele Adkins & Greg Kurstin

This beautiful guitar ballad is great for beginner guitar players. The guitar chords interplay beautifully and is a great study in arrangement. Enjoy!

This song has had a tumultuous legal decade which deserves a few educated remarks: An accusation arose in 2015 among fans of Ahmet Kaya that Adele’s chorus section plagiarized “Acılara Tutunmak”, released in 1985. Ahmet Kaya himself did not take the accusation to court. As a music educator, I want to point out that the chord progression and the appertaining melody sequence that they share are standard compositional patterns of Western music history. To take another contemporary example, similar chords and melody are also found in the theme from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical “The Phantom of the Opera”, released in 1986.
Another accusation of plagiarism, this one taken to court, came in 2021 from composer Toninho Geraes who composed “Mulheres”, recorded by Martinho da Vila in 1995. The legal claim pointed to the similarity of the two compositions’ introduction and verse sections (compare the first 39 seconds of the two). This claim of plagiarism eventually won in court in 2024. Again, I want to point out that the chords and melody in the verse section are also similar to “Yesterday, When I Was Young”, written by Charles Aznavour in 1973 and recorded, most famously, by Glen Campbell in 1974. The first verse of Adele’s lyrics ends on the line «When I was young» and is an explicit citation of this.
By making such comparisons, I simply want to illustrate the fact that Western music history has established certain compositional patterns, and when composers deploy these, their compositions are likely to sound similar. Therefore, what might seem like composers stealing is often just composers using patterns that belong to everyone and no one in particular. This fact takes our notion of originality down a peg, certainly the originality of mainstream songs like these, and it should make us reconsider what we mean when we ask whether a song is ‘original enough’ to deserve copyright protection.
(By making this point, however, I do not want venture any legal opinion. I know a lot about music theory, but not much about law. Many other kinds of fact should be taken into legal consideration as well – most importantly, facts about what songs the composers knew, what intentions they had, etc. – none of which have much to do with music theory.)