A lawsuit claiming that Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ was ripped from a country and western song has been dropped.
Country singer Andy Stone claimed the pop diva’s festive classic had been stolen from his own song of the same name.
The tune, which Carey claimed to have written on a “cheap Casio keyboard”, has to date had more than a billion plays on Spotify.
Stone, who performs as Vince Vance with the country-pop band Vince Vance & the Valiants, sued Carey and her label Sony Music Entertainment in June.
He claimed his own “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was first released in 1989 and received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 Christmas season.
An amended version of the complaint called Carey’s song a “derivative version” of Stone’s “in terms of the lyrics, melody, harmonic language, rhythm, and meter.”
Stone had asked the court for $60 million in damages for copyright infringement, false association and unjust enrichment.
Stone told the court he would dismiss the case without prejudice, which means it could be refiled.
Over the years, Mariah, 53, has earned a bumper crop of royalties from the anthem, released 28 years ago on October 29, 1994. Although an official figure has never been released, a study by The Economist estimated a yearly income of $2.5 million (£2.2 million).
It came as Carey announced that a secret grunge album inspired by Courtney Love and Green Day she made in 1996 – the same time as her iconic album Fantasy - may be released to the world for the first time ever.
She revealed that there was unease about her grunge lyrics, telling Rolling Stone: “I honestly wanted to put the record out back then under, you know, the same pseudonym, just put it out and be like, you know whatever, let them discover that it’s me. But that idea was kind of stomped and squashed.”
