Megan Thee Stallion and Big Sean have reached a settlement with two little-known Detroit rappers, ending a lawsuit claiming the hip-hop superstars ripped off an earlier song with their 2020 collaboration “Go Crazy.”
In a lawsuit filed in July, Duawn “Go Hard Major” Payne and Harrell “H Matic” James claimed that Megan’s song sounded so much like their 2012 track “Krazy” that there was no way it had been created independently without illegal copying.
But just four months later, attorneys for the pair of accusers notified a federal judge Friday (Nov. 11) that the two sides had “reached an agreement in principle to settle their dispute in its entirety.”
The public filing did not disclose any terms of the agreement, like whether any money would exchange hands or songwriting credits would be altered. Attorneys for both sides did not immediately return requests for more details.
“Go Crazy,” released on Stallion’s 2020 debut album Good News, didn’t chart as a single, but the album spent 75 weeks on the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 2 in December 2020. The song featured both Big Sean and 2 Chainz, though the latter was not named in the current lawsuit.
In their July 25 complaint, Payne and James claimed that various aspects of “Krazy” and “Go Crazy” are “nearly identical,” including the wording of the chorus, melodic and harmonic sequences and the use of cadence.
“An average lay observer would recognize the infringing work as having been appropriated from [‘Krazy’] because of the striking similarity between the two compositions and the way in which they are performed,” said the complaint.
Since “Krazy” was never released by a label, the attorneys for the two accusers made a creative, hyper-local argument for why Stallion or Big Sean had enough “access” to the song that they were able to copy it — a key requirement in any copyright infringement lawsuit. They said Payne and James had performed the song in “West Detroit hip hop clubs and bars” where Big Sean — a Motor City native — had frequently gone. The pair also sold “thousands of physical copies of CDs” in the parking lots of those same clubs, their lawyers argued.
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