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Ariana Grande latest artist sued for alleged song-theft

By | Published on Friday 17 January 2020

Ariana Grande

Ariana Grande is being sued in the US over her 2019 hit ‘7 Rings’ which, “by every method of analysis”, is a rip off of an earlier track called ‘You Need It, I Got It’ by Josh Stone. Or so says Josh Stone.

Stone is suing Grande and the plethora of other co-writers involved in ‘7 Rings’ – a song that includes the lyric “I want it, I got it” – though most of his allegations relate to one of those co-writers, producer Tommy Brown.

In a lawsuit filed this week, Stone claims that, having recorded his track in January 2017, he had various meetings with music industry types looking for opportunities to release his music and collaborate with other artists.

One of those meetings was at Universal Music Publishing where, he alleges, Brown was among the people invited to attend. The producer, Stone then claims, subsequently got in touch saying he’d enjoyed ‘You Need It, I Got It’ and that he was interested in collaborating.

No such collaborations ever happened though. “Instead”, says that lawsuit, “upon information and belief, defendant Brown simply took ‘I Got It’ to Ariana Grande and the other defendants and later repackaged ‘I Got It’ into ‘7 Rings’.

Having established how Team Grande would have had access to Stone’s record – which he subsequently posted to YouTube in November 2017 – the lawsuit then goes to great lengths to explain just how similar the two songs are.

“A lay person listening to the ‘hook’ and chorus of both songs can hear the strikingly similar and, at times, identical beat, rhythm and lyrics of both songs”, reckons the legal filing.

Meanwhile, one of those sneaky musicologists has been comparing the two tracks and, the lawsuit adds, “from a scientific, musicological perspective, the rhythmic structure, metrical placement, duration of rhythmic pattern and lyrical elements of composition in ‘7 Rings’ are either identical or substantially similar to ‘I Got It'”.

Stone accuses Grande and her team of wilful and vicarious copyright infringement, false designation, reverse passing off and unjust enrichment, and would like lots of lovely damages.

Team Grande are yet to comment.



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