Artists don’t play when it comes to their pockets, particularly artists who have been in the music game for over two decades. New York hip-hop duo Black Sheep is going after their hard-earned money by suing Universal Music Group (UMG), claiming that the company exploited them.
According to Rolling Stone, the duo, comprising Andres “Dres” Vargas Titus and William “Mista Lawnge” McLean, alleged that UMG owes them approximately $750 million after violating their contracts through a “sweetheart” deal with Spotify.
They claimed that the company received cash and company stock from Spotify as payment in exchange for their artists’ music. Black Sheep also alleged in the lawsuit that UMG agreed to cut artists’ royalties in its deal with Spotify to receive the stock, which benefits UMG.
Black Sheep broke into the hip-hop industry in the early ’90s, releasing chart-topping hits like “The Choice is Yours” from their fan-favorite album “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” The group signed with PolyGram (before merging with Universal) in the early ’90s, where their contract mandated UMG to pay artists 50% of all net receipts concerning the exploitation of their music.
“In the mid-2000s, Universal struck an undisclosed, sweetheart deal with Spotify whereby Universal agreed to accept substantially lower royalty payments on artists’ behalf in exchange for an equity stake in Spotify – then a fledgling streaming service,” the lawsuit read. “Yet rather than distribute to artists their 50 percent of Spotify stock or pay artists their true and accurate royalty payments, for years Universal shortchanged artists and deprived plaintiffs and class members of the full royalty payments they were owed under Universal’s contract.”
It continued, “For approximately a decade, Universal omitted from the royalty statements Universal issued to plaintiffs that it had received Spotify stock in connection with the ‘use or exploitation’ of Black Sheep recordings.”
The lawsuit stated that UMG’s stake in Spotify was valued at nearly $1.7 billion in September 2017, with a “substantial portion” coming from the shares Universal and its subsidiaries received in 2008.
This isn’t the record label’s first rodeo with having a lawsuit dealing with Black Sheep. In 2011, “Super Freak” singer-songwriter Rick James and Public Enemy founder Chuck D included rock band Whitesnake, The Temptations’ Otis Williams and Ron Tyson, musician Bo Donaldson and Black Sheep in their lawsuit against UMG for not paying artists their portion of the revenue from the company’s licensing agreements with Apple, AT&T and Sprint.
The lawsuit accused UMG of hiding the licensing agreements as sales, claiming they were sales income instead of licensing. Over $11 million settled the case.
