Mariah Carey Christmas story turns frosty as singer sued for £16.5 million
It’s beginning to feel a lot like a Mariah Carey Christmas.
That typically involves two things: All I Want for Christmas is You, the seminal December track that reminds us how Christmas songs used to be a thing, and the notion that Mariah Carey is ‘defrosting’ again in time for another festive season. But this year there’s another element: a lawsuit.
Carey was also sued for copyright infringement over All I Want For Christmas Is You in 2022, and this time it’s to the tune of £16.5 million.
Songwriters Andy Stone and Troy Powers claim Mariah Carey ripped off their song. The duo also wrote a song with the same name that was released in 1989, four years before Carey first released her ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ in 1993.
Documents filed through the federal court in Los Angeles allege substantial similarities between the two songs, including the hook and melody. TMZ obtained court documents which claim Carey “palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own.”
“If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 percent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,” the duo’s lawyer Douglas M. Schmidt told Rolling Stone magazine.
They also claim lyrical similarities. In court documents the pair say: “The phrase, ‘all I want for Christmas is you,’ may seem like a common parlance today, (but) in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive.
“Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50% clone of Vance’s original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
According to The Economist, by 2017 the Mariah Carey song had generated almost £50 million in royalties.
Here is the 1989 version of the song.
And here is the Mariah Carey version.