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Beyoncé Sued for Over $20 Million by Slain YouTube Star's Estate for Sampling a Song

posted by martyb on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:07PM   
from the diamonds^W-copyrights-are-forever dept.

takyon writes:

Beyoncé is being sued by the estate of a deceased New Orleans YouTube star:

Beyoncé's apparent appropriation of New Orleans culture stirred controversy with the release of her 2016 single "Formation" — with its groundbreaking video and the song itself nominated for an array of Grammy Awards this year.

But the family of a murdered New Orleans rapper whose voice is sampled on the bouncy track has spurred a new $26 million lawsuit claiming the celebrated pop singer, who recently revealed she's pregnant with twins, stole the copyrighted material.

Messy Mya was shot and killed in 2010.

[As an adjunct to this discussion, I cannot too highly recommend Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Award winning short story: Melancholy Elephants . -Ed]

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Original Submission

• Re:Copyright trolling (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday February 13 2017, @10:56AM

  by FakeBeldin (3360) on Monday February 13 2017, @10:56AM (#466533) Journal

  You think a single song released only a year ago would have made so much money that 1% of the singer's profits would amount to $20 million?? So the singer would've made $2 billion out of that one song in the course of one year? Really??

  <Hypothesis time>

  Some website imagined/estimated Beyonce's yearly income at $54 million. (e.g. here [paywizard.org]). That sounds okay to me, but hell, let's just double that to get a higher upper bound. So we've put an upper bound of $108 million on Beyonce's income per year. (Note that wikipedia lists her net worth as $265 million, so this yearly figure is way too high)

  Now Beyonce tours, sells other songs, and probably does other things to make money. But let's pretend that this one song was responsible for 10% of her imaginary ludicrous amount of yearly income in 2016 (even though it was less than 10% of the album it was released on). In that case, Beyonce's income for this one song would be $10.8 million.

  Now that's the year of the song's release. With enormous luck, its financial viability would halve every year (no, it'd go way faster, but okay). So that's 10 million + 5 million + 2.5 million + 1.25 million + ... Basically, it never makes $20 million in that scenario.
  (The distance remaining is cut in half precisely, so there's always half of what this year contributed "left").

  </Hypothesis time>

  But enough with the hypotheticals. According to this list [pajiba.com] (and also this list [therichest.com]), Happy Birthday (1893) is the most profitable song by a very comfortable margin. A $14 million margin even. Happy Birthday garnered $50 million. Over the course of 120 years. By requiring every restaurant in the USA to pay for singing it. And since this is by sisterS, they'd have to split the $50 million in two.
  The 2nd highest earning song on both lists is White Christmas (1940), with estimated earnings of $36 million. The songwriting credits go to Irving Berlin, but a substantial part of the revenue is generated by the version of Bing Crosby. So, best case, the whole profit is split amongst only these two folks: an average of $18 million a person.

  So it's safe to say that no single person's contribution to a contemporary pop song is worth $20 million.

  Parent

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