DUBAI: US pop superstar Ariana Grande has settled a lawsuit brought by a hip-hop artist who accused the singer of plagiarizing her 2019 smash “7 Rings” from a song he wrote two years earlier.
Josh Stone, from New York, 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.
In 2020, 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.
According to the defendants, ordinary listeners would consider the songs “very different,” and that Stone had no monopoly over everyday phrases such as “I got it.”
