Where there’s a dance-pop No 1, there’s a songwriting dispute. Fresh from the lawsuit that saw Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams ordered to pay Marvin Gaye’s family $7.4 million (Dh27.1 million) for copying his music to create Blurred Lines, the songwriting credits for Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk have been expanded. It is now attributed to 11 different writers.
The new credits have been given to the writers of the Gap Band’s Oops Up Side Your Head: group members Ronnie Wilson, Charles Wilson and Robert Wilson, plus producers Rudolph Taylor and Lonnie Simmons. They join the six writers already credited: Ronson, singer Bruno Mars, producers Jeff Bhasker and Philip Lawrence, plus Nicholas Williams (Trinidad James) and Devon Gallaspy, who received credits for the use of a sample of Trinidad James’s All Gold Everything.
The credits followed a claim by the publisher Minder Music, reports Billboard. The claim, rather than being sent to Ronson’s label or publisher, was filed with YouTube’s content management system in February. The Oops writers are believed to be taking a 17 per cent share of the song.
Trinidad James’s manager Danny Zook told Billboard the Blurred Lines verdict had changed attitudes to songwriting credits in the industry. “Everyone is being a little more cautious. Nobody wants to be involved in a lawsuit,” he said. “Once a copyright dispute goes to a trial, it is subject to be decided by public opinion — and no longer resolved based entirely on copyright law.”
Uptown Funk has been an enormous commercial success. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 consecutive weeks, selling more than 5 million copies in the US alone. It spent seven non-consecutive weeks at No 1 in the UK, and set a new record for the number of streams. It has sold more than 1.7 million copies in the UK.
