King Crimson over a sample used in Kanye West’s ‘Power’.‘Power’ – which featured on the critically acclaimed fifth studio album ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted’ – samples King Crimson’s song ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ from their 1969 debut album ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’.
UMG owns and operates the record label Def Jam Recording, a division which – in a joint venture with Roc-A-Fella – distributed the song.Allegedly, West sampled the track without license.
Now, the song has over 926million plays on Spotify and garnered over 140million views since it was first uploaded to YouTube in 2010.UMG was hit with legal action in 2022 when the prog band filed a complaint, alleging the music conglomerate owed them royalties from West’s 2010 hit.
The claimant in this case was Declan Colgan Music Limited (DCM), the owner of the mechanical licence for ’21st Century Schizoid Man’.DCM claimed the royalties they received for streaming were not comparable to those they had received for CD sales.
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