Songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer allege that the opening melody to the hit single, the longest-running Top 10 song ever by a female artist on the US Billboard Hot 100, is a “duplicate” of the melody to their 1979 song Wiggle and Giggle All Night and their 1980 song Don Diablo.
“Defendants have levitated away plaintiffs’ intellectual property,” lawyers for Brown and Linzer wrote in a wry complaint. “Plaintiffs bring suit so that defendants cannot wiggle out of their wilful infringement.”
The songwriters highlighted interviews with Lipa, in which they said she “admitted that she deliberately emulated prior eras” and “took inspiration” from historic music for the “retro” sound of her 2020 album, Future Nostalgia.
Their lawsuit claims that the “signature melody” from the introduction to Levitating copied a similar portion of their songs, and cited the popularity of that section of Levitating on TikTok as key to its success.
“Because video creators frequently truncate the already brief snippets of sound on TikTok, the signature melody often comprises 50% or more of these viral videos.”
The suit named Lipa, her label Warner Music Group and rapper DaBaby, who appeared on a remix of the song, along with other songwriting and production parties. “In seeking nostalgic inspiration, defendants copied plaintiffs’ creation without attribution,” Brown and Linzer claimed.
Last week, Lipa was sued by the Florida band Artikal Sound System, who claimed that Levitating was so similar to their 2017 song Live Your Life that it was “highly unlikely that Levitating was created independently”.
