Mariah Carey has been awarded $92,000 after a judge dismissed a lawsuit relating to her hit ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
The country singer Andy Stone – who performs under the stage name Vince Vance – first filed a suit against Carey in a Los Angeles federal court in November 2023. He alleged that Carey’s song infringed the copyright of his 1989 song of the same name and that the pop singer had exploited his “popularity” and “style”.
“If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, said at the time.
In March, Judge Monica Ramirez Almadini ruled that Stone’s lawyers had not “met their burden of showing” that the two songs were “substantially similar”, instead citing expert testimony that asserted that the two songs simply shared “Christmas song cliches” that had been present in several earlier songs.
Now, court documents have revealed that the judge has ordered Stone to pay Carey $92,303.20 (£68,294.33) in sanctions, saying that the suit lacked merit and arguing that the sanctions were intended to deter similarly baseless lawsuits. Stone had been seeking at least $20million (£16million) in damages.
In November last year, Almadini had said she was “inclined” to throw the case out, after Carey’s team had requested it be dropped as the claims failed the court’s “extrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression”.
Back in 2020, Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ became a UK Number One for the first time ever, 26 years after it was first released. This month, it also achieved a record-breaking 20th week at the top spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.
This year, the top spot went to Kylie Minogue’s new festive single ‘XMAS’, a feat that made her the first female solo artist to top the charts in four different decades.
‘XMAS’ is also the first Amazon Music Original single ever to reach Number One, and Kylie recently spoke to NME about the track’s success. “It’s been amazing,” she said. “Like with all songs, once they go out into the world, all you want is for them to go out and have their own life. So now it’s pretty weird and amazing having people doing the ‘XMAS’ [dance on such a wide scale]. I think it’s going to follow me around forever!”
“I saw that a whole village in Devon made a video doing the ‘XMAS’ dance together,” she added. “It was like [CMAT’s] ‘the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker’ trend, and it made me very emotional. To see straight away that it has connected with people and that it means something to them… It’s amazing.”
