Miley Cyrus is being sued over allegations that she and the co-writers of her 2023 hit single Flowers copied portions of Bruno Mars’ 2013 song When I Was Your Man.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Los Angeles federal court by the company Tempo Music Investments, which claimed that Flowers includes unauthorised “exploitation” of the song. Co-writers Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack are also named, and Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, Walmart and other companies are accused for distributing the song.
Mars, however, is not named as a plaintiff: Tempo Music said it owns a portion of When I Was Your Man purchased from co-writer Philip Lawrence.
The Guardian has contacted representatives for Cyrus and Mars for comment.
Tempo Music is seeking yet-to-be-determined damages as well as to prohibit Cyrus from reproducing, distributing or publicly performing the song.
The lawsuit states: “Any fan of Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man knows that Miley Cyrus’s Flowers did not achieve all of that success on its own. Flowers duplicates numerous melodic, harmonic, and lyrical elements of When I Was Your Man, including the melodic pitch design and sequence of the verse, the connecting bass line, certain bars of the chorus, certain theatrical music elements, lyric elements, and specific chord progressions.”
It continues: “It is undeniable based on the combination and number of similarities between the two recordings that Flowers would not exist without When I Was Your Man. With Flowers, Cyrus, Hein and Pollack have created a derivative work of When I Was Your Man without authorisation.”
Flowers won Cyrus her first Grammy at this year’s ceremony, for best pop solo performance. The song spent eight weeks at No 1 in the US last year, and 10 weeks in the UK.
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