Ariana Grande Settles Song ‘7 Rings’ Lawsuit
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, who performs as DOT, revealed the settlement with Grande and 13 other defendants, including her publishers and several songwriters, in a 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 every day phrases such as “I got it.”
Grande, 27, gave song writing 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.