Jermaine Dupri is suing Sony Music Entertainment over accusations that the music giant owes him and his label more than $18 million in unpaid royalties tied to albums from Mariah Carey, Usher and others.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday (July 7) and obtained by Billboard, the legendary hip-hop producer and his So-So Def Recordings accused Sony of a “systemic pattern” of using “contemptuous accounting practices” to underpay royalties for many years.
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“So-So Def had a 32-year contractual and business relationship with SME,” Dupri’s lawyers write. “As it turns out, many of SME’s dealings with So-So Def have not been lawful and have harmed So-So Def in its business.”
In addition to songs by Carey and Usher, the lawsuit claims Sony owes Dupri and his label royalties for music by Kris Kross, Xscape, Bow Wow, Da Brat, J-Kwon, and Bone Crusher, in addition to Dupri’s own music as an artist.
Dupri, who wrote and produced Kris Kross’s 1992 all-timer “Jump,” had a long career as a hit-making producer, helping Carey, Usher, Nelly and others create chart-topping tracks. He also released a pair of studio albums himself, featuring high-profile collab tracks with Jay-Z and Ludacris.
The son of former Columbia Records executive Michael Mauldin, Dupri founded So-So Def in 1993 as a joint venture with Columbia and Sony, where he later signed Xscape, Bow Wow, Da Brat and others. That partnership ended in 2002 and, after several more years at Sony imprints, So-So Def hopped from EMI to UMG to several other distributors.
In Tuesday’s lawsuit, Dupri says Sony repeatedly failed to pay proper royalties to him and his company, both during their partnership and after. For instance, he says the label never reported producer royalties from Kris Kross’s first two albums, including their smash Totally Krossed Out, which featured “Jump,” and that he’s owed more than $2 million as a result.
Dupri also accuses Sony of improperly “cross-collateralizing unrecouped account balances” to avoid paying and using other bookkeeping trickery. For instance, he claims the company still insists that the girl group Xscape has more than $1.5 million in unrecouped advances decades after their albums were released.
“It is unfathomable that Xscape’s royalties were insufficient to recoup the entirety of Xscape’s advances on [their early albums] — both albums were certified platinum by the RIAA — let alone to leave such a staggering unrecouped balance 25-30 years later,” his lawyers write.
Dupri says Sony also tried to hide its actions, including “deceptively” placing Kris Kross royalties in a separate accounting system and amending royalty statements for Jagged Edge to cover past underpayments.
“SME knew that it was violating the contracts with the plaintiffs and never attempted to disclose its contemptuous accounting practices to the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit claims that royalties for music by Carey, Usher, Bow Wow and others have been “understated” to an unknown extent, and that more than $10 million in interest is owed for various unpaid royalties.
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