What we see right now is the beginning of the "intellectual property" lawsuit wave. Music producers, artists, and record labels have always known that pop music

What we see right now is the beginning of the "intellectual property" lawsuit wave. Music producers, artists, and record labels have always known that pop music doesn't come out of thin air and is highly repetitive. For some popular chord progressions and main melodies you can literally find thousands of practically identical songs. Until recently, copyright holders have avoided lawsuits except in cases of blatant copying, because of some form of legal MAD. However, as sales are declining and it gets harder and harder to make a sustained living even for fairly popular artists, this will change more and more. Laws have been implemented almost solely in favor of copyright holders (=companies and usually not the artists) and in almost complete disregard for art. There will be many more lawsuits of this kind in the future, and once the dam is broken, more large companies will jump in, too. Hobby musicians will get sued more and more, too, or at least their shares will be taken away from them. The vast majority of all pop songs is not original in the pro-IP and anti-art sense that lawmakers have facilitated over time, so it's going to be a large bloody legal slaughtering for the remaining bread crumbs. But maybe hobby music and private performances will benefit this in the long run. Mainstream music will become even less melodic and weirder than it already is, as these songs (e.g. in contemporary "R&B") are developed to avoid lawsuits while still kind of "sounding like a hit". It's a tricky business.