Post Malone has refuted claims made by a songwriter who worked on his hit single, ‘Circles’, who is now suing him.
Tyler Armes first filed a federal lawsuit in California almost two years ago, in April 2020. He listed Post, the singer’s producer Frank Dukes and Universal Music Group as defendants in it. Furthermore, he’s seeking credits as co-writer and co-producer, as well as prospective and retrospective royalties from the track.
Postie’s complaint reads, “It is an age-old story in the music business that when a song earns the type of runaway success that ‘Circles’ has garnered, and individuals will come out of the woodwork falsely claim to take credit for the song, and demand unwarranted and unearned windfall profits from the song.”
However, in a new court filing that has come to light, Post has said that Armes didn’t add anything “original” to the song. He claimed his contribution was “an admittedly extremely commonplace guitar chord progression” and also potentially “fragment of a guitar melody that Armes claims he sung to Post”.
Armes has claimed he was offered five per cent of the song’s royalties before this offer was withdrawn when he asked for a more significant cut.
Post’s new court documents state: “Armes admitted that his contributions did not even rise to the level of originality, which is also required in addition to the fixation requirement. He either conceded that his ideas were commonplace musical devices or failed to meet his burden to demonstrate any originality otherwise. Armes thus cannot even establish the threshold requirement that he made a copyrightable contribution.”
It added: “Armes does not have a shred of affirmative evidence with which to meet his burden of proof that his alleged contribution to the guitar melody is original.” Additionally, Post is asking the judge to dismiss Armes’ lawsuit because he is “not a joint author” of the song.
In response, Armes’ lawyer Allison Hart told Rolling Stone: “We believe that the motion for summary judgment is a desperate attempt by Post Malone and Frank Dukes to try to avoid a trial in this action. We are confident that we will prevail in defeating the motion and look forward to going before a jury.”
