Lil Wayne Producer Sues UMG Over Unpaid Royalties

Lil Wayne producer, Darius “Deezle” Harrison has sued UMG over their alleged failure to pay him royalties for his work on Tha Carter III.

Harrison is a credited producer on six tracks on the hugely successful album including Billboard Hot 100 number one hit “Lollipop”.

In his lawsuit, he claims that UMG owe him a total of $3 million in royalties going back a decade.

Harrison claims that per his contract with Cash Money Records, he was entitled to a 4% royalty rate for all of the songs he worked on for Wayne’s classic album.

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He also alleges that he is owed a 3% royalty rate from a second agreement he had with Cash Money for work he did on Birdman’s 2005 album Fast Money.

The producer previously sued Wayne, Cash Money and Young Money over his royalties in 2011 and this case was settled shortly afterwards.

Harrison claims he began receiving royalty checks from UMG in 2012 around the same time the first lawsuit was settled but that this stopped almost immediately.

Neither UMG nor Lil Wayne have yet responded to the lawsuit.

UMG are of course currently being sued by their own artist Drake, who was also previously under the Cash Money and Young Money umbrellas.

Drake is accusing the record giant of defaming him through the release and promotion of Kendrick Lamar’s chart-topping diss track “Not Like Us”.

UMG denied the accusations and recently blasted Drake as a hypocrite for initiating the legal action given things he also said during his beef with the Compton superstar.

In a bid to dismiss the case, UMG said: “As Drake concedes, Lamar’s Super Bowl performance did not include the lyric that Drake or his associates are ‘certified pedophiles’ (i.e., the alleged ‘Defamatory Material’ that is at the heart of this case).

“The focus of Drake’s new claims—that ‘the largest audience for a Super Bowl halftime show ever’ did not hear Lamar call Drake or his crew pedophiles—betrays this case for what it is: Drake’s attack on the commercial and creative success of the rap artist who defeated him, rather than the content of Lamar’s lyrics.”

They added: “Nowhere in the hundred-plus page ‘legal’ blather written by Drake’s lawyers do they bother to acknowledge that Drake himself has written and performed massively successful songs containing equally provocative taunts against other artists. Nor do they mention that it was Drake who started this particular exchange.”