17 December 2024, 19:19
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Getty
Adele has been ordered to pull a song from her catalogue by a judge after he backed a claim that the British singer had plagiarised a composer.
The 2015 track Million Years Ago is said to be too similar to Mulheres, a 1995 hit by the Brazilian composer Toninho Geraes.
A Brazilian judge is now trying to get her record label to suspend sales of the song and stop it being played on streaming services like Spotify.
Victor Torres issued a legal injunction ordering ony Music Entertainment and Universal Music must stop “immediately and globally, from using, reproducing, editing, distributing or commercialising the song Million Years Ago”.
Geraes has asked for $160,000 (£126,000) and a songwriting credit on Million Years Ago.
Read more: ‘Shut up, alright?’: Adele slams heckler who shouted ‘Pride sucks’ at Las Vegas show
He wrote Mulheres for the Brazilian singer Martinho da Vila.
This is not the first time that Adele has found herself in a plagiarism dispute over Million Years Ago.
Kurdish artist Ahmet Kaya said that she had used the same tune as his 1985 song Acilara Tutunmak.
Ed Sheeran, another famous British singer, has been accused of plagiarism in writing his hit song Shape of You.
He won a plagiarism case against musicians Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue in 2022, and said afterwards that “claims like this are way too common now and have become a culture where a claim is made with the idea that a settlement will be cheaper than taking it to court, even if there’s no basis for the claim”.
Sheeran added: “It’s really damaging to the songwriting industry. There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.
“Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify. That’s 22 million songs a year, and there’s only 12 notes that are available.”
He won a similar case in the US against the company that owns the rights to Marvin Gaye’s song Let’s Get It On, when a court ruled that his song Thinking Out Loud did not copy the 1973 song.