Kanye West Settles Lawsuit Over Alice Merton Sample Claim
Kanye West Settles Lawsuit Over Alice Merton Sample Claim
Kanye West, who performs as Ye, has settled a lawsuit brought by German singer-songwriter Alice Merton. The settlement is conditional. A court filing dated 6 November says it depends on both sides completing certain performance obligations, which are specific actions each side agreed to carry out. Billboard reported the settlement on 13 November.
Merton sued Ye last year. She alleged that his 2024 track "Gun to My Head" used part of her song "Blindside" without permission. Using a piece of an existing recording in a new song is called sampling, and it normally requires clearance, meaning approval from the rights holder.
Merton said she had turned down Ye's clearance request months earlier. She said that, as a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors, she did not want her work linked to his past antisemitic remarks. The case had been set for trial in March.
The song's release history is unusual. "Gun to My Head" never appeared on streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music. It came out on a digital deluxe edition of the album Vultures 2, which could be bought only during a two-day window in 2024.
In October, a month before the settlement, a judge denied Ye's request to remove all references to the Holocaust and antisemitism from the Merton lawsuit. Those references therefore stayed in the case until it was settled.
Sampling disputes are not new for Ye. Billboard reports that he has been sued more than a dozen times over unlicensed samples and interpolations. An interpolation is a newly recorded version of a melody or passage from an earlier song, rather than a copy of the original recording.
The case also sits alongside a public apology. In January, Ye published a lengthy apology in the Wall Street Journal for years of public hate speech. That apology included praise of Hitler and the sale of swastika T-shirts. In it, Ye wrote that his controversial comments came from a 2002 car crash that caused severe brain damage and bipolar disorder.
The settlement ends the court fight between the two artists, provided the agreed obligations are met.
