Kanye West loses trial over “Hurricane” sample

Kanye West, now known as Ye, is nothing if not Icarian. A court decided on Tuesday that the rapper will have to pay over six figures after pilfering music from an unreleased demo track for a sample on an early version of “Hurricane.” The version in question was played for fans at a Donda listening event at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2021. Now, Ye is set to pay $176,153 out of his own pocket. Yeezy LLC will pay the same restitution rate, and his retail merchandising companies, Yeezy Supply and Mascotte Holdings, will each pay $41,625 and $44,627. 

Artists Revenue Advocates (ARA) sued Ye on behalf of four musicians responsible for composing the music that the rapper sampled. The six-day trial began last week, where ARA alleged that Ye earned over $5 million in ticket sales, merch cuts, and streaming royalties from the Atlanta listening event in July 2021. “Hurricane,” they reminded the jury, had been partially leaked the night prior to entice fans to the concert. “Hurricane” later became the most-streamed track on Donda.

The sample, a one-minute instrumental demo titled “MSD PT2,” was composed by Khalil Abdul-Rahman, Sam Barsh, Dan Seeff, and Josh Mease in 2018 and shared with a producer with connections to Ye. The four musicians, who never met Ye, then heard their demo sampled in a video on the rapper’s Instagram account six months later. In court last week, Ye claimed to have removed the sample from “Hurricane” after the Atlanta event. The final version of the song that appears on Donda incorporates recreated elements of the original demo. Irene Lee, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, said the sample would heretofore be associated with the song and, as such, compromised for the musicians. Milo Yiannopoulos, a “spokesperson” and “legal liaison” for Ye, presented the jury with invoices as part of the defense’s attempt to prove that Ye did not make money from the Atlanta listening event. Yiannopoulos was barred from opinion testimony due to not being an “expert witness.”  

Ye’s lawyer Eduardo Martorell, for his part, argued the case was a “money grab.” He further claimed ARA had “pounce[d]” on Ye due to his history of mental illness, and claimed without evidence or explanation that the lawsuit may be because of “a personal vendetta.” This lawsuit against Ye is ARA’s first. During his opening statement, Martorell derided the group and the musicians’ decision to use it. ”Who’s behind it?” he asked the jury of ARA, who voted unanimously in favor of Abdul-Rahman, Barsh, Seeff, and Mease a week later. “Why wouldn’t the artists sue in their own name if they felt so strongly about this?”

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