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Sleigh Bells sue Demi Lovato over song-theft claims

By | Published on Tuesday 23 August 2016

Demi Lovato

Now, you all surely remember that day back in December 2015 when Demi Lovato’s career reached its absolute peak as she was presented with the prestigious – and some would say, prestigious – Beef Of The Week prize by your best buds over at the CMU abattoir. She secured that accolade and the resulting career high simply by (allegedly) ripping off some Sleigh Bells tracks on her song ‘Stars’.

Well, I bring this up now because the whole thing’s just gone legal. Sleigh Bellers Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller are suing Lovato, her label and her producers – Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub – claiming that they lifted elements of Sleigh Bells track ‘Infinity Guitars’ without permission when making ‘Stars’.

When the Sleigh Bells first accused Lovato of ripping them off – via Twitter, obviously – Falk and Yacoub told Entertainment Weekly that “we did not use any samples in Demi Lovato’s song ‘Stars'”, before noting that the singer herself wasn’t directly involved in the production of the track.

But, in their legal complaint, Sleigh Bells allege that ‘Stars’ nevertheless contains “compositional elements” of ‘Infinity Guitars’, which basically means – even if the Lovato track didn’t contain any samples – its producers are still accused of lifting elements of the Sleigh Bells track, even if they then recreated them.

“A comparison of the two songs reveals that, at the very least, the combination of the hand claps and bass drum, structured as three quarter beats and a rest, with the bass drum providing a counter-rhythm to the hand claps, is at least substantially similar in both works”, says the lawsuit.

The similarities, the lawsuit adds, “transcend the realm of coincidence”. Which is actually a good name for an album, now I think about it. ‘Transcending The Realm Of Coincidence’. I might suggest it to Ed Sheeran.

Lavato et al are yet to respond.



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