(This was what I wrote about my "hobbies and interests" to get onto my English course.)

It was 1990, I was eight or nine, and I was a New Kids on the Block fan. I had posters, and buttons, and their names written on my plimsolls in Crayola Washable Marker... and this is what I discovered:

There is a short burst in their “tough” song “Games” (which, of course, you will never have heard, nor probably ever hear, but please pretend that you are interested) that sounds hilariously like the guards' marching song from “The Wizard of Oz”.
This is funny because: the guards are singing an NKOTB song, and the NKOTB are singing a song they should only be singing if they are goose-stepping around a castle courtyard trying to avoid being coshed by a Scarecrow, Tin-Woodsman and Cowardly Lion. (I was little, it *is* funny!)

I also came to realise that a song on their previous album was a *shameless* rip-off of “Love Me For a Reason” by the creepy-beyond-all-reason Osmonds. This was less funny as I didn't care at all for the Osmonds, but I remembered it.

So during the next thirteen years I occasionally noticed the same thing – instances of which I'm sure I have now forgotten the bulk of – and played the songs for people, and was driven half-mad by these soundalikes until I figured out what song it was that each was ripping-off!

I never actually thought much of it really until a song came along that I *couldn't* work out; I heard “Stole” by Kelly Rowland (I had grown some musical taste by that point, I promise), and the hook was *something* - it was *something* and I had no idea what.
And that made my head hurt.
So I listened to it more than was healthy, I repeated the same section over and over, I played it for people.
“It sounds like a traditional Scottish song, but I don't know what!”, I cried, people shrugged and looked slightly frightened of me, and got sick to death of that song. As I did.

So I thought “I can't be the only one...”.
Google is everyone's friend.
Except when searching for kelly+rowland+stole+sounds+like... when it was decidedly unhelpful – apparently I *was* the only one.
Presumably apart from a dead Scottish bloke wishing he could litigate from the afterlife.

In any case there wasn't a site listing the songs to help people in the same situation I was in, which surprised me as there are several sites about Mondegreens and the phenomena are similar in a way.

I am self-taught and more-or-less competent in web design (all done the long way around – I can't afford Dreamweaver), so I started to think about a website dedicated to this.
I often *think* of ideas for websites; they rarely come to fruition or are anything other than abandoned if they do – I prefer the building to the maintaining.

I was staying at a friend's house, and had shared gales of laughter with her and her housemate that Bob Marley apparently shared melody ideas with the Banana Splits theme composer:

Said he was fighting on arrival, fighting for survival;
Said he was a Buffalo Soldier win the war for America.
Dreadie, woy yo yo, woy yoy-yoy yoy,
Woy yoy yoy yoy, yoy yoy-yoy yoy!
Tra la la, la la la la,
Tra la la, la la la la!
Four banana, three banana, two banana, one.
All bananas playing' in the bright warm sun.
Flipping' like a pancake, popping like a cork,
Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper an' Snork

• They are generally both (the original and the rip-off) very good songs.
• Some elements are taken often – to name one, the introduction to “And Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals was used as the theme tune to “The Big Breakfast” and also cropped up in “Stop” by Erasure and “Chewy Chewy” by the Ohio Express.
• Some artists who have "influenced" melodies have done the same thing themselves in the past or do after it has happened to them:

  The Pixies > Nirvana > Radish
  Stevie Wonder > Oasis > Hearsay
  The Stone Roses > Natalie Imbruglia > A1 (though the soundalike was of a cover version she recorded.

• They don't always go unnoticed. There have been lawsuits with results ranging from turning over the royalties and partial copyright of the song to the Plaintiff, and songs being prevented from appearing on future albums.
  
  These songs include:

  Cat Stevens - “Father and Son” Vs The Flaming Lips - “Fight Test”
  The Chiffons - “He's So Fine” Vs George Harrison - “My Sweet Lord”
  Neil Innes - “How Sweet to be an Idiot” Vs Oasis - “Whatever”
  

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Please do not use my work in any way without permission, ta. :)

Obviously I understand that artists might be a bit peeved to read that people think they have stolen a melody/hook/intro etc from another artist.
If you believe your copyright has been infringed in this way - sort it out between yourselves, please don't bring this site into it.
</covers ass> :O)