OAN’s Abril Elfi
2:55 PM – Thursday, November 2, 2023
Mariah Carey is being sued again by Andy Stone over her holiday hit song “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Stone and co-writer Troy Powers, who is also a plaintiff in the current case, filed an identical complaint in Louisiana last June, but it was abandoned five months later.
Stone, who is a part of the group Vince Vance and the Valiants, filed a civil lawsuit against Carey, co-writer Walter Afanasieff, and Sony Music Entertainment in the Central District of California on Tuesday.
He alleged “copyright infringement and unjust enrichment” over a successful song titled “All I Want for Christmas Is You” that he co-wrote in Nashville and released in 1989.
New court records obtained by the press stated that Stone’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” garnered radio play in 1993 and went on to become a smash on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles & Tracks list the following year. This was around the same time that Carey’s hit song was released.
The lawsuit says that Carey duplicated the “compositional structure” of Stone’s 1989 song, despite the fact that the docs recognize that the phrase “all I want for Christmas is you” was not invented by Stone.
According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Carey and her collaborators “undoubtedly had access” to Stone’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” when writing her eponymous song, “given its wide commercial and cultural success.”
“Defendants knew or should have known that ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ could not be used in a musical work by Defendants without a license and/or songwriting credit, as is customary practice in the music industry,” read the documents.
Documents state that the plaintiffs want a jury trial and $20 million in damages.
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