Another week, another case of alleged music industry plagiarism. This time it concerns two music videos and we have to admit, looking at a side-by-side comparison done by the accusing director, they do look pretty similar.

As triple j reports, The Weeknd already had enough to deal with after his eagerly anticipated sophomore album, Beauty Behind The Madness, leaked earlier this month, but now his new music video has been slammed with plagiarism accusations.

The stylish clip for ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ features the R&B singer performing in front of a nightclub audience. But for filmmaker Mitch Moore, the video bears a “resemblance [that] is too uncanny” to a clip he filmed for Canadian duo Majical Cloudz last year.

However, Moore’s video for Majical Cloudz never actually saw the light of day. But according to a lengthy missive left on his Instagram account, Moore insists the video was shared among industry figures and received “many feedback emails”.

Moore believes someone “must have seen one or more of these unreleased edits”, accompanying his words with a shot-by-shot comparison set to the tune of Shania Twain. “My mind is a mansion of creativity, so this petty theft is [no big deal] to me,” he writes in the post.

So about a year ago, I directed a video for Majical Cloudz. Because of creative differences, it never came out. But the production was large, and many feedback emails were sent out with private uploads of the edit. It's come to my attention that some body at the helm of a certain mega popular video must have seen one or more of these unreleased edits. The resemblance is too uncanny. My mind is a mansion of creativity, so this petty theft is nbd to me. BUT I'M STILL CALLING THE POLICE!! 😜😜😜😜. —————– Good god now I have to make an addendum cuz of p4K et al!!! I'm NOT calling out any specific body including the video's director. BTW neither premise is original, and I'm not defending my work here. But the mise en scene of the shots and their function within the scene were too uncannily parallel. Third parties alerted me to this fact. I posted for two reasons. One: The Shania gag was HILARE!!! Two: The moneyed folks in the mainstream waste so much money trying to make half-hearted copies of work originally pioneered by gifted and under-resourced artists – many of whom I know personally. Plagiarism and brain drain happens at even the most shadiest of bcc: levels y'all…The fashion/production/management world is narrow. Again, idk nor idc if this actually happened in this case. But I MUST SAY – In the creative agency world, the gank-giddy decision making of creative directors (or whatever u call them) is silly because these folks know how to find the gurls. They could save so so so much money and get more impactful end products if they came straight to the source instead of hiring a middleman with the word "savvy" on their resume. I just don't get it. *goes back to storyboarding

A video posted by Mitch Moore (@mitch____moore) on

Majical Cloudz themselves have distanced themselves from Moore’s accusations, taking to Twitter to write, “For Any Concerned Journalists: I have made no accusations to anyone whatsoever, the director of an aborted project is dragging me into this.”

“For the record I wouldn’t even care at all if there was any resemblance, but there isn’t and our idea was unoriginal anyway. A video director we didn’t particularly enjoy working with for a brief period in 2013 doesn’t speak for the band! haha.”

Readers can check out the video at the centre of the controversy below.