Dionne Warwick has filed a lawsuit accusing a rights management company of stealing “millions of dollars in royalty income” from her “Walk On By” and other iconic hits.
Artists Rights Enforcement Corp. first sued Warwick last year, claiming she’d unfairly reneged on a longtime partnership. The group said it had lucratively represented her for years, including negotiating the Warwick sample in Doja Cat’s recent chart-topping “Paint the Town Red.”
But in a scathing countersuit on Monday, Warwick’s lawyers are telling her side of the story: That AREC exploited a one-page agreement hastily signed in 2001 to quietly skim millions of dollars from the 85-year-old singer for more than two decades until she recently caught on.
“Ms. Warwick seeks to expose AREC’s performative ethics and vindicate her rights and obtain restitution for the damages caused by AREC’s decades-long pilfering of millions of dollars in royalty income she earned as a result her legendary recordings,” her lawyer Robert S. Meloni writes in the court filing, obtained and first reported by Billboard.
Calling AREC a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Warwick says the group has wrongfully taken royalties from songs including “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Alfie,” and many others recorded over her long career.
Warwick’s lawsuit also claims that AREC improperly scuttled a potential deal Warwick was negotiating with Primary Wave to sell the company revenue streams from her sound recordings. The group allegedly reached out to Primary Wave to say that Warwick could not do so — a move her lawyers say was an illegal effort to “destroy or damage Ms. Warwick prospective business opportunity.”
AREC was founded in 1977 by Chuck Rubin, a music industry figure who the New York Times once described a “white knight of rock” who had made a career out of “helping the performers who shaped rock-and-roll to receive what their songs have earned.” Gabin Rubin, Chuck’s daughter, has served in top roles at the company since the late 1990s.
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In its December lawsuit, AREC claimed that one of those artists had been Warwick. The company said it had worked “at great effort and expense” to boost her royalties for decades “at no cost to her,” in return a 50 percent cut of any money recovered through the enforcement efforts. It specifically called out the sample in Doja’s “Paint,” which spent three weeks atop the Hot 100 and 37 overall weeks on the chart.
But in Monday’s countersuit, Warwick’s attorneys say that complaint “grossly exaggerates” the services AREC actually provided to the star over the years, and certainly doesn’t account for the “staggering” and “disproportionate” cut it took from her royalties.
“It is full of self-aggrandizing statements designed to inflate its purported contributions and justify the unmerited windfall of millions of dollars to which it was not entitled,” her lawyers write. “When you strip away the illusion manufactured by AREC and expose the lie, AREC’s efforts were at best nothing more than administrative in nature, or activities that music lawyers routinely perform for an hourly fee.”
In a response statement to Billboard on Tuesday, AREC defended its work for Warwick, saying she had been receiving only “a small fraction” of her rightful compensation before hiring the company.
“Artists Rights’ work has multiplied the amount of royalties that Ms. Warwick receives, both from her classic masters and the expanded use of her work, such as Doja Cat’s hit “Paint the Town Red,” the group said in the statement. “We look forward to proving that Artists Rights is entitled to its fee for the extensive work it has done for Ms. Warwick.”
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The dispute between Warwick and AREC centers on a 2001 agreement inked by both sides after the singer retained the group to chase down unpaid royalties allegedly owed to her by then-called Warner Bros. Records. AREC claims that deal gives it the right to enforce her rights “in perpetuity.”
But in Monday’s countersuit, Warwick’s attorneys say she believed that deal, signed without a lawyer, applied only to the specific dispute with Warner Bros: “Instead, for 23 years AREC took a 50% share of anything and everything that flowed as a result of her creative output from 1962 to 2001.”
Over that period, AREC has “collected and deposited into its own bank account all of Ms. Warwick’s royalty income,” Warwick’s lawyers say. And in a “profound failure of the transparency required” the group “never prepared or rendered any accounting statements” for such payments.
Warwick says she didn’t discover the problem until September, when she retained Douglas J. Davis, a well-known music attorney. Davis immediately demanded more detailed records from the group, and later terminated the deal when such files were not provided, sparking the December lawsuit.
“Rather than addressing the reasonable demands made by Ms. Warwick’s counsel or offering any justification for its numerous defalcations, AREC instead chose to initiate this litigation against Ms. Warwick.”
In technical terms, the lawsuit accuses AREC of breaching its fiduciary duty to Warwick, defrauding her, and breaching its contract with her. It also claims that it committed “tortious interference with prospective business relations” by intervening in the Primary Wave negotiations.
