Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
Lawyers representing the estate of the late songwriter Ed Townsend in the copyright dispute over Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’ have claimed that the ongoing legal battle is another example of the music industry unfairly exploiting black musicians.The Townsend estate first sued Sheeran, his label Warner Music and publisher Sony/ATV back in 2016.
It alleges that ‘Thinking Out Loud’ stole the “melody, harmony and rhythm compositions” of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’, which Townsend co-wrote.The lawsuit has plenty of parallels with the other big song-theft cases that have been heard in the American courts in recent years, including the ‘Blurred Lines’ case – which involved another of Gaye’s records of course – and the ‘Stairway To Heaven’.
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