10 Songs That Led To Massive Lawsuits

British record producer Mark Ronson has a reputation as a hitmaker in the music industry. He's penned songs for the likes of Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse, so any collaboration with pop superstar Bruno Mars was likely to be a winner. To make absolutely sure, Ronson and Mars allegedly combined a number of elements from songs that they already liked when making Uptown Funk, leading to a bombardment of lawsuits from aggrieved artists.

Despite its extremely derivative boogie throwback style, Uptown Funk was a commercial success and broke the worldwide streaming record when it was released in 2014. The hard-done-by artists from the previous paragraph began to look for their cut of the profits. Minneapolis electro-funk band Collage claimed that Uptown Funk “is an obvious, strikingly and/or substantially similar copy” of their 1983 single Young Girls. They could even point to the fact that the pair had gone on the record about the influence of early 1980s Minneapolis electro-funk soul music. The case was settled out of court with no details of a financial settlement disclosed in early 2018.

Later that year, Ronson and Mars settled another dispute out of court with Lastrada Entertainment, the copyright holders of the 1980 song More Bounce to the Ounce by Zapp. Again, the details of the settlement weren't disclosed but Lastrada sought damages, a jury trial, and a permanent injunction to prevent Ronson from performing the song in concert. It would appear as though the injunction was ineffective as Ronson was performing the song live in 2019. It was reported in 2018 that Ronson was still facing a lawsuit from Sequence, the band behind the 1980 song Funk You Up, over similarities between their songs. The result of this lawsuit has not yet been reported.