Legendary producer, A&R and songwriter Jermaine Dupri and his label So So Def Recordings have sued Sony Music over allegations he is owed at least $18 million in unpaid royalties that are due on an assortment of records he was involved in making.
That includes releases by Xscape, Da Brat, Mariah Carey, Bow Wow, Usher and Kris Kross, for whom he wrote and produced seminal 90s hit ‘Jump’.
Dupri says he is owed money from numerous records which were released under a number of different business partnerships he had with Sony, from 1992 through to the late 2000s. Which means, his lawsuit claims, there is a “systemic pattern” at the major of “underreporting royalties”, “failing to report royalties” and “altering and/or updating statements to report previously earned royalties”.
These practices, he says, constitute “wilful deceitful actions” that were designed to “harm” Dupri and his companies. And because, he adds, these issues seem to be widespread across Sony, there are likely to be yet more unpaid royalties owed to Dupri and So So Def that his team have not yet identified.
The royalties dispute between the producer and Sony, which has been bubbling up since 2023, is complicated because he had a number of different dealings with the major from 1992 onwards, as a producer in the studio, as someone signing artists into Sony, and through a short lived joint venture label called GANY Records.
Dupri’s original partnership with Sony ended in 2002, after which he entered into a new alliance with the Arista label, which at the time was owned by rival major record company BMG.
However, the following year Sony and BMG merged their respective record companies, with Sony ultimately taking complete control of the combined recordings business. Which means Sony ended up with all the Arista recordings Dupri was involved in as well.
The various deals Dupri did were complex, and had a variety of different arrangements regarding how he and So So Def would share in future income. There were also differing terms relating to when - and if - Sony could recoup advances and other costs out of future royalties, and whether that meant recouping advances paid to Dupri and So So Def directly, or to the artists Dupri had brought to the major.
But having apparently made sense of all those complexities, Dupri’s team have concluded that across the board Sony has failed to properly report income and royalties, and has repeatedly underreported and underpaid money that is due on the recordings the producer was involved in.
Among other things, Dupri’s lawsuit alleges that Sony “underreported producer royalties’ due on Xscape's 1993 record ‘Hummin Comin At Cha’ with the result that “over $960,000 in producer royalties have been unlawfully held”. Similar underreporting on Da Brat’s 1994 record ‘Funkdafied’ has resulted in “over $1,000,000 in producer royalties” going unpaid.
The lawsuit says that some of the royalties So So Def is due on Xscape’s first two albums have not been paid supposedly because advances to the artist remain unrecouped. As a result, a 2020 royalty statement for those records was showing a negative balance, with $1,531,241 still owed to Sony.
However, the lawsuit insists, it is “unfathomable that Xscape’s royalties were insufficient to recoup the entirety of Xscape’s advances” given “both albums were certified platinum”.
Plus, in 2021 Sony made a commitment to start paying through royalties to unrecouped artists whose deals were more than 20 years old. So, “even if a portion of Xscape’s original advances remained unrecouped”, after 2021 those balances “should have been nullified” resulting in “a payment of approximately $1,000,000 to So So Def”. But, alas, no.
Elsewhere the lawsuit claims that Sony has understated royalties due on releases by Mariah Carey, Bow Wow, Usher, J-Kwon and Bone Crusher, as well as Dupri's own records, though “the amount of additional royalties due is yet to be determined”.
Disputes between artists and major labels over unpaid royalties stemming from old record deals are not uncommon and usually get settled out of court.
However, Dupri’s claims are particularly interesting - and extra complex - because they relate to a significant number of records and various different deals, making it harder for Sony to claim that any unreported or unpaid money was due to isolated errors or admin issues.
Which plays into Dupri's overriding allegation that the multifarious royalty issues he is now tackling are the result of a “systemic pattern” of bad conduct.
Almost certainly Sony will disagree with that stance. Though, no matter how they fight back against Dupri's claims, and assuming an out of court settlement isn’t immediately agreed, this dispute should result in some interesting revelations about the internal mechanics of the world’s second biggest record company.