Legendary singer Dionne Warwick has countersued the royalty management company that accuses her of unlawfully terminating a 25 year old contract.
Slightly different to other run-of-the-mill royalty disputes, Warwick opens her counterclaim by citing two other legendary figures, in the shape of Aesop and Jesus. Because if you have both Aesop and Jesus on your side, you can cancel any contract you want. Surely?
Aesop’s fable ‘The Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing’ is “a cautionary tale that has particular relevance to the present dispute” between Warwick and Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation, the singer’s lawsuit states. And as Jesus himself once said, possibly alluding to Aesop’s fable, “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”.
AREC is the false prophet in this particular story, according to Warwick, because it “professes to help artists secure fair compensation for their creative work”, and to “negotiate settlements”, and, in an almost Trumpian piece of rhetoric, to “fight to make your music yours again”.
But in fact its motives, the lawsuit claims, are entirely self-serving. “AREC more closely resembles Aesop’s proverbial wolf, cloaking itself in professional credibility while concealing its own self-interest”.
Warwick now seeks to “expose AREC’s performative ethics” and “vindicate her rights”, and “obtain restitution for the damages caused by AREC’s decades-long pilfering of millions of dollars in royalty income”. It’s a fine day when a lawsuit includes not only Aesop and Jesus, but also the word ‘pilfering’.
Warwick hired AREC right back in 2001 to help sort out a royalty dispute with Warner Music over money she was due from recordings that were controlled by the major. It later also sorted out another dispute Warwick had with Sony Music. In return it takes 50% of Warwick’s royalties, and 25% of the money she earns directly from UK collecting society PPL and US rights organisation SoundExchange.
In its own somewhat less poetic lawsuit filed last December, AREC justified taking half of Warwick’s label royalties by insisting that, because of its work, those royalties had “increased approximately sixtyfold” generating “more than $2.5 million in revenue, including an average of over $350,000 annually over the past five years”.
But Warwick’s lawyers argue that AREC has been incorrectly interpreting that 2001 contract for more than two decades, taking 50% of all of the singer’s Warner royalties when that arrangement should only have applied to 1960s recordings released by Scepter Records, which Warner had acquired. They also question why AREC was ever entitled to a share of Warwick’s PPL and SoundExchange income.
Warwick’s countersuit also casts doubt on the impact of AREC’s work. For example, while AREC oversaw a lawsuit that resulted in the renegotiation of a 1971 Warner deal, that legal action “did not result in any improvements or other new benefits” for Warwick. And even if it did, “all AREC did was recommend the law firms that actually handled the litigation and negotiated the settlement agreement”.
All of which means “the decades long windfall AREC received at Ms Warwick’s expense was not based on the proximate result of its efforts and was materially disproportionate to the fair value of its services”.
So, to summarise, this wolf in sheep’s clothing claimed it could make Warwick’s rights great again while concurrently tricking her into an unfair deal that gifted the company 50% of her royalties for minimal effort. And it then extended that agreement to a whole load of royalties that were never actually covered by the deal. Or, at least, that’s how Warwick and her legal team would have it.
Wolves are not known for their ability to respond to legal filings, but here’s hoping that when ‘AREC the wolf’ gets round to it, the response includes quotes from some other ancient Greeks, or some nice Buddhist wisdom, or maybe some pithy phrases from Pliny, all in its own bid to convince the court that AREC is, in fact, nothing more than a well meaning and artist-friendly sheep.
