By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ariana Grande has settled a lawsuit by a hip-hop artist who accused the pop superstar of plagiarizing her 2019 smash “7 Rings” from a song he wrote two years earlier.
Josh Stone, a New Yorker who performs as DOT, revealed the settlement with Grande and 13 other defendants, including her publishers and several songwriters, in a Tuesday filing in federal court in Manhattan.
Terms were not disclosed, and a judge ordered the dismissal of Stone’s lawsuit because of the settlement. Lawyers for the parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Stone had claimed that “highly regarded musicology experts” had concluded that the beat, hook, lyrics and rhythmic structure of “7 Rings” were lifted from his song “You Need It, I Got It.”
He said he pitched his song at meetings at Universal Music Group attended by one of Grande’s producers, the defendant Tommy Brown, and was “not receiving the credit due for the success experienced by ‘I Got It’ and ‘7 Rings.'”
The defendants said ordinary listeners would consider the songs “very different,” and that Stone had no monopoly over everyday phrases such as “I got it.”
Grande, 27, gave songwriting credit to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for “7 Rings” because it borrowed from their song “My Favorite Things,” from the Tony-winning Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film “The Sound of Music.”
Her song spent eight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, and its video has been seen more than 954 million times on Google’s YouTube.
One of the best-selling pop artists in the last decade, Grande was as of Sunday was the second-most streamed female artist in 2021 on Spotify, after Taylor Swift and ahead of Dua Lipa.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
