Bad Bunny has become embroiled in a legal battle that could have huge consequences for the reggaeton scene and its producers.
It concerns a track called Fish Market, originally produced by Steely and Clevie back in 1989. Some parts of the song became components of the dembow riddim, which is one of the foundations of reggaeton as a genre.
Since 2023, Cleveland ‘Clevie’ Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson made a claim that could potentially affect over 100 artists and approximately 1,800 songs.
At a hearing in early July, US District Judge, AndréBirotte Jr determined that a jury should ultimately decide whether the musical combination identified by the plaintiffs is sufficiently protected by copyright and whether numerous reggaeton recordings copied those protected elements without authorisation.
However, last week Bad Bunny’s legal team and attorneys representing other artists succeeded in getting the judge to reconsider that original decision. Birotte Jr said that he would now need to take several weeks to make an order concerning the issue.
The case revolves around what actually constitutes the dembow riddim. The plantiffs contend that the dembow is derived directly from Fish Market.
However, Bunny’s attorney and others are arguing that the ‘Fish Market Elements’ in dembow do not constitute a continuous musical passage from a single composition. Instead, they say, it uses portions of different (but not continuous) sections of Fish Market along with another Steely and Clevie piece, Pounder (Dub Mix II).
Copyright protection, they argue, cannot be based on a musical arrangement assembled from different portions of different works when those portions do not appear together in the copyrighted composition. And in any case the composition copyright for Pounder belongs to another Jamaican producer Dennis ‘The Menace’ Halliburton, who is not a part of the lawsuit.
Yes, it’s all fiendishly complicated and clearly musicologists will have to be called in at some juncture.
The Bad Bunny songs that are affected include Tití Me Preguntó, Un Ratito and Una Vez, all of which use dembow. Other artists who have used it and thus could be pulled into this dispute include Justin Bieber, Daddy Yankee and Pitbull. Many other less successful artists and producers will also doubtless be on tenterhooks as to the judge’s decision in this complex case.
