The Gen Alpha Melody

Añadido: 2026-05-22

[00:01:08]So, okay. So, so what's going on here? Are they all copying the same melody? Might  just might just be a coincidence.

[00:01:33]All right. I get the point. But you know it's only  pop music. It's not even like like real music.

[00:02:02]Okay. Um but you know they're all in English.  All those songs they're all in English.

[00:02:25]Okay, that's that's weird. But you know,  it's only countries from Western culture.

[00:02:54]I've named this melody the gen album  melody referring to the time period most of these songs were released. Why is this  interesting? The world of music is built upon inspiration and melodic and harmonic  norms. So being inspired is inevitable.

[00:03:08]This is seen throughout history in chord  progression such as the 145s of blues or the 251s of jazz or the axis of  awesome progression in pop music.

[00:03:24]It's also seen in different  production techniques such as the use of sampling jazz and soul in hip-hop or the heavy use of ch orus in the 80s. This  is why we call things cliches because our ideas inspire each other. But the Gen Alpha  melody is different and that's because it's a fullyfledged melody being copied. This means  it's a very specific melody and a melody that could have easily been a victim of copyright.  What makes this so interesting is that I've never seen a specific melody come even close to  being as used in popular music. The only ones I can think of are melody writing techniques  such as one note melodies like the super tonic melody which Andrew Huang made a video  on or like the triplet flow of trap music. But the Gen Alpha melody is a bit too specific. A  hypothetical comparison would be if the riff or the melody to Seven Nation Army was copied  100 times and no royalties were being paid to the White Stripes. But what makes this  melody so specific? Here's how it works.

[00:04:23]All right. So the melody is made up  of four notes split into two phrases.

[00:04:29]It starts on the fourth degree and it's then  followed by the note a tritone below which is a seventh. Next up is the second phrase which  begins on the third and then jumps down a fifth to the sixth degree. If that didn't make sense,  I was just naming the different degrees of the major scale as opposed to just the names of  the keys because the melody isn't always in C major and the notes are therefore not always  F, B, E, A. Make sense? Great. Also, not all melodies including that specific series of tones  are the Gen Alpha melody. For example, last year I tried going viral by jumping on the trend with  this composition, but it didn't really work out.

[00:05:12]What constitutes the Gen Alpha Melody  is therefore that these four notes are the pillars of the melody which means all  other tones revolve around these because they're landing on strong beats or  the melodic phrase ends on them.

[00:05:51]The reason I think this is such a widely copied  melody is because it's a prime example of a good melody. And good melody is obviously subjective  when talking music, but at least in traditional terms. Melodies in classical music are built  up by questions and answers. It might seem a bit weird to call a melody a question,  but I never really asked for your opinion, did I? Another way to phrase it is as dissonance  and consonance, which is basically what all music is built up on. You can hear the first phrase  is setting up to something, but you can't really just end a phrase there. And to that question we  get an answer but it's sort of inconclusive.

[00:06:30]It's not really, you know, the answer you wanted So it's followed by another question and then you finally get the answer you wanted It feels consonant, or it's a nice feeling ending on this tone(note) There are obviously some small deviations with the different examples but all the melodies all share this characteristic framework: those four pillars In conclusion, it's a great sounding melody by itself and has this bittersweet which also makes sense given that heartbreak or melancholia is one of the most common lyrical themes in all of music Like, nearly all of the uses of Gen Alpha Melody have lyrics that are about heartbreak or melancholia in some shape or form All of the examples I've shown follow this formula with the four pillars but there are hundreds more examples out there When finding these examples, I stumbled upon  hundreds of examples of songs that sounded alike from different users on YouTube,  Reddit, or Tik Tok. And some come close, but not quite to being the exact melody.  And that's because they only contained at least two of the aforementioned pillars of the  Gen Alpha melody. For example, I've seen Lady Gaga mentioned several times on post on this  subject. You probably recognize this melody.

[00:08:08]The difference here is that the last pillar  ends on the third instead of the sixth, which means it only has three pillars instead of four. Here's some other examples of  outliers of the Gen Alpha Melody.

[00:08:46]Most of these definitely have the same  vibe and sort of the same structure, but I wouldn't categorize them as  using the Gen Alpha Melody. It's just sort of the same vibe. There are many  examples of this, but here are a few more.

[00:09:08]All right. So, I want to make it very clear that  this is in no way an attempt to bash any of these artists or to claim lack of originality of  any of these songs. All of them have these different features that make them original other  than the melody, whether that being the harmony, lyrics, groove, or production. But again, this  doesn't really seem like a coincidence. So it still begs the question Lawsuits in music are always a popular topic because nobody wants to see anybody take credit for somebody else's work and on the flipside nobody wants to see somebody get wrongly accused of stealing when they aren't In broad terms the way it works is that if you make a song with the melody of another song or similar to another song and gets sued a court decides whether or not you have to give songwriting credit to the original songwriters, which is a cut that varies The metrics which the verdict is based upon can for example be the aforementioned pillars of the Gen Alpha melody Some popular examples of songs that had to pay the original songwriters for copying include: But even though radio head Sam Smith and George  Harrison had to give songwriting credits to the original songwriters, I don't think those examples  come anywhere near to being as similar as the hundreds of uses of the Gen Alpha Melody. And  that's because the Gen Alpha Melody is a case of what's called interpolation. And interpolation  involves taking part of an existing musical work as opposed to a sound recording and incorporating  it into a new work. This means it's not sampling, but rather a copy of the melody. Some artists do  this consciously, like Right Round by Flo Rida being an interpolation of You Spin Me Round by  Dead or Alive or 7 Rings by Ariana Grande being an interpolation of My Favorite Things from Sound  of Music. This is what a lot of EDM artists do because they know the popularity and recognition  of the melody will make it easily digestible, which is great solely from a financial standpoint  because it'll get more streams and the cut you have to give to the songwriters is made up for  by the recognition and therefore more streams than if it had another melody. Some also do  this subconsciously, meaning they probably weren't aware that they were stealing. Artists  like Ed Sheeran and Oasis have been accused of this several times. Either way, they have to pay a  huge cut to the original songwriters if the songs are not in the public domain. A counterargument to  plagiarism in music is that there are only seven notes to choose from. But that argument falls  short because there are endless possibilities when it comes to even the major scale in a four  bar phrase. Look up pandiatonicism for example.

[00:12:15]In pop music, what happens is that once you're  confined to having it sound easily listenable, it narrows the options down significantly since  common chord progressions and pop formulas are the norm. This is why I don't think most of  the songwriters of songs with the Gen Alpha melody made a conscious decision to steal or  interpolate, but rather just fiddled around with the melody to a very common chord progression and  subconsciously heard what sounds good from their past listening experiences. Okay, so everybody's  copying everybody and they are basically doing an interpolation of this melody. That's fine,  but who made the melody? Who gets the money?

[00:12:54]Clairo is a name that pops up a  lot because Sophia was such a big hit and most of the examples of the Gen  Alpha melody come from 2020 and onwards.

[00:13:01]She's also a very respected artist, so  nobody really sees her as unoriginal.

[00:13:08]But she didn't write the melody because I can  find several other examples from before 2019 with the exact same melody. All the cases  from the 2010s lead back to Lady Gaga, which I mentioned used a variation of the Gen  Alpha melody. But this is still not the bottom of this rabbit hole. Because through this  extensive research, all clues lead back to one person and a song released in 2004, which  is the oldest use of this melody I can find.

[00:14:10]Oh, and just on an ending note, there's  this obscure Scouse band who used it, but they probably didn't influence anybody.