Dua Lipa faces new lawsuit over hit song 'Levitating'
Singer-songwriter Dua Lipa has faced a new lawsuit over her 2020 hit Levitating—yet again.
On July 31, Ghanaian musician Bosko Kante filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in Los Angeles against the British pop star and Music Warner Group.
Kante claims they never received his permission to include his “talk box” recording in remixes of Levitating. According to him, they had a verbal agreement to use it on the original track only.
A talk box is a wearable device around the neck used to manipulate the sounds of musical instruments through the user’s vocal vibrations. In 2014, Kante founded a company named ElectroSpit that designs and manufactures a digital version of the tool.
The lawsuit alleges copyright infringement on three remixes, namely The Blessed Madonna, the DaBaby feature, and Dua Lipa’s performance at the American Music Awards.
“All three remixes sampled and incorporated a greater amount of plaintiff’s work than that used in the original version,” the suit claims.
Kante seeks at least $20 million (P1.1 billion) in damages.
Dua Lipa’s Levitating is the longest-charting song by a female artist on the Billboard Hot 100, spending a total of 77 weeks on the chart. It was also named as the No. 1 song of 2021.
This is not the first copyright lawsuit for the hitmaker. In June, a court dismissed a similar complaint from the reggae group Artikal Sound System due to lack of evidence. A separate complaint by songwriters Sandy Linzer and L. Russel Brown was filed in March 2022 for the same reason.