Summer Walker is taking her fight with the music industry to court, seeking to erase her record deal with Love Renaissance Records while accusing the company of fraud and facing a separate $50 million legal battle with Interscope Records.
She is asking a court to rule that the agreement she signed with Love Renaissance Records on September 15, 2017 is void and unenforceable.
Walker’s suit accuses LVRN and its management company of fraud and breach of contract. It alleges the company diverted money meant for recording and touring to cover what she calls excessive company expenses, and that she was denied revenue from YouTube and Amazon pages that use her name and likeness. The complaint runs 10 pages, was filed in August, and seeks unspecified financial damages. The allegations have not been proven in court.
“Summer has given LVRN iconic music, and some of the best years of her life,” said her attorney, Keith Moten. “In return, LVRN has breached Summer’s trust in them and has failed Summer in numerous ways.”
What makes this different from a contract dispute is the direction it runs. Walker is already being sued. Interscope Records is seeking more than $50 million from her, arguing she still owes albums under a five album commitment, after she gave notice that she intended to leave the agreement using California’s seven year rule, the statute that caps personal service contracts at seven years.
So she is on both sides of her own catalogue at once. One label says she owes it records. She says the paper she signed nine years ago should never have held her in the first place.
Nothing in either case is decided. What is already clear is the posture. An artist who is being billed $50 million for using a law written to free workers from indefinite contracts has not gone quiet and has not asked to renegotiate. She has asked for the original agreement to be erased.
That is the expensive version of ownership, and it is the version that gets argued in public. The quiet version is signing again on slightly better terms and hoping the next decade goes differently. Black women in music have been offered the quiet version for a long time, and the ones who refuse it tend to spend years and money proving a point that a reader can use on a much smaller contract: the paper is not the same thing as the truth, and it can be challenged.
Walker is asking for the paper to go.
