Holiday music is a big business. It’s also a big source of litigation.
When Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” stormed back to the top of the Hot 100 this month, it wasn’t alone. Each of the current top five songs are holiday tracks, with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” in second and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” coming in fourth.
All those streams make for some serious royalty money. Lee’s perennial classic earned nearly $4 million in 2022, and even lesser songs like “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” typically earn hundreds of thousands per year. In 2018, Billboard estimated that the entire Christmas music genre raked in $177 million in the U.S. market alone – a total that has almost certainly grown in the years since.
And where popularity and money go, lawsuits usually follow. As veteran music industry attorneys are fond of saying: “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ”
With the holidays right around the corner, Billboard is breaking down the many times that Christmas music has ended up in court – from Mariah’s ongoing copyright battle over “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to Darlene Love’s fights with streamers to repeated courtroom clashes over religious freedom. Here are the five big cases you need to know:
‘All I Want For Christmas Is’ … A Copyright Lawsuit
Carey’s 1994 blockbuster is THE modern holiday song – now re-taking the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earning a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022. So it’s no surprise that she’s facing a lawsuit seeking a cut of that cash.
Starting in 2022, Carey has faced copyright infringement allegations from songwriter named Vince Vance, who claims she stole key elements of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his 1989 song of the same name. He claims that the earlier track, released by his Vince Vance and the Valiants, received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
“Carey has … palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance wrote in his latest complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”
Unsurprisingly Carey’s lawyers see things differently. In a motion filed earlier this year seeking to end the case, her legal team argued that the two songs shared only generic similarities that are firmly in the public domain – including basic Christmas terminology and a simple message that’s been used in “legions of Christmas songs.”
“The claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like “Santa Claus” and “mistletoe,” and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs,” Carey’s attorneys wrote at the time.
With Christmas now looming, it looks like Vance might be getting a lump of coal in his stocking: At a hearing last month, the judge overseeing the lawsuit said she would likely side with Carey and dismiss the case.
Good Grief: ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Sues Dollywood
Less than two months before Peanuts television producer Lee Mendelson passed away in 2019, his production company sued Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park – accusing the park of using the music from his “A Charlie Brown Christmas” without permission.
The songs of jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s legendary soundtrack to the 1965 television special, including classic originals as well as updated standards like “O Tannenbaum,” are firmly in the Christmas canon – and none more so than “Christmas Time Is Here,” which Guaraldi co-wrote with Mendelson.
In a lawsuit lodged in federal court, Lee Mendelson Film Productions Inc. accused Dollywood of using that song for decades in Christmas-themed theatrical production without proper licenses, calling it “willful copyright infringement” and “blatant disregard” of the law.
As is often the case in such lawsuits, Dollywood had secured a blanket license from BMI to publicly play millions of songs for its guests, but would have needed a separately-negotiated “dramatic license” to use it in a stage play: “Defendant knew from the beginning of its infringement that its performance license from BMI does not cover ‘grand’ or ‘dramatic’ rights,” the company wrote.
With a trial set to kick off in December 2021, both sides agreed to a confidential settlement that summer to resolve the case.
Concert Clash: Holiday Cheer or State Religion?
Do Christmas concerts at public schools violate the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state? It’s a question that’s been fought in court many times – and when a federal appellate judge weighed it in 2015, she didn’t miss the opportunity to sprinkle holiday references into her opinion.
For decades, Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana held an annual winter concert centered on an “elaborate, student‐performed nativity scene,” featuring religious songs (including “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head”) along with a narrator reading passages from the New Testament.
Unsurprisingly, after students and parents sued in 2014, a federal district court ruled that such an overtly Christian show violated the First Amendment and its ban on the establishment of a state religion. But when the school later made substantial changes — removing the bible readings and adding songs representing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among others — both the district judge and an appeals court said the new version of the show passed constitutional muster.
In her 2018 appellate opinion, Judge Diane Wood waxed poetic – saying that “since ancient times, people have been celebrating the winter solstice” and that the Concord High case put the court “in the uncomfortable role of Grinch.”
“But we accept this position, because we live in a society where all religions are welcome,” Judge Wood wrote. “The Christmas Spectacular program Concord actually presented in 2015 — a program in which cultural, pedagogical, and entertainment value took center stage — did not violate the Establishment Clause.”
Baby Please: Darlene Love Sues Over Her Voice
Before Mariah was the “Queen of Christmas,” that title was sometimes used for Darlene Love – and the original queen hasn’t been afraid to enforce her rights to her iconic holiday tracks “A Marshmallow World” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
Back in 2016, attorneys for Love filed a lawsuit against Google over allegations that the tech giant used “Marshmallow” without permission in advertisements for its Nexus smartphones. A few months later, she filed a nearly-identical lawsuit against cable network HGTV, accusing the channel of using “Come Home” in another set of ads.
Darlene Love photographed on November 14, 2020 in Spring Valley, NY.
Mackenzie Stroh
Those might sound like copyright lawsuits, but they weren’t. Instead, Love accused the companies of violating her so-called right of publicity by using her voice in the commercial, claiming that her voice was so well known that using the songs falsely implied she had endorsed those products.
“Defendant’s actions were despicable and in conscious disregard of Love’s rights,” her lawyers wrote at the time. “Defendant turned her into an involuntary pitchman for programs of dubious quality. Defendant created multiple commercials that falsely implied to the public that Love had endorsed HGTV’s programming.”
If successful, the cases could have raised difficult issues for advertisers who want to feature popular songs in their commercials — potentially requiring that they both clear the copyrights to the music and obtain explicit permission from any famous performers. But the litigation never got far: Love dropped her lawsuits later that year.
‘Christmas in Dixie’ Royalties Battle In Australia
When a singer-songwriter named Allan Caswell filed a lawsuit claiming that the country band Alabama had stolen key elements of their 1982 country hit “Christmas in Dixie” from his earlier song “On The Inside,” the case came with a twist: He wasn’t actually suing the band itself.
Instead, he filed his lawsuit against his own music publisher, Sony ATV Music Publishing Australia, for failing to collect royalties from the allegedly copycat song. According to an iteration of the lawsuit filed in 2012, the publisher’s musicologist concluded years earlier that the two tracks “shared a level of similarity” that went beyond a “random occurrence of sheer coincidence.”
But why sue Sony and not Alabama? According to Caswell, it was that the American band was also signed to another unit at Sony – and he claimed that his publisher was refusing to take action as a result.
“That’s the problem,” Caswell told a local TV station in Australia. “I’m signed to Sony ATV. Alabama is signed to Sony Music. So it’s all in-house. There’s no incentive for them to take action. They basically can’t take action because they’d be suing themselves.”
In 2014, an Australian judge dismissed claims by Caswell, ruling there was no evidence that Alabama frontman Teddy Gentry had ever heard “On The Inside” before he wrote his Christmas track. “I am satisfied that it is unlikely that he could have heard the plaintiff’s song by picking it up from the theme music of episodes of Prisoner,” the judge said at the time.
Jailhouse Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
If you were subjected to “constant” holiday songs for 10 straight hours every single day while serving a prison sentence, you might file a lawsuit too.
That’s what an Arizona inmate named William Lamb did in 2009, accusing Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (yes, that Joe Arpaio) of violating his constitutional rights with a non-stop slate of Christmas tunes at a Tucson correctional facility.
According to Lamb, the prison swapped out regular television programming in favor of “constant Christmas music,” which was played in the facility “continuously and repeatedly” from 9 am to 7 pm. The playlist included secular tracks like Elmo & Patsy‘s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and The Chipmunks, but also the Tabernacle Choir singing traditional Christmas carols.
In his lawsuit, Lamb alleged that holiday music marathons “forced him to take part in and observe a religious holiday without being given a choice,” violating the First Amendment. Arpaio argued back that the music served a secular purpose, aimed at “reducing inmate tension and promote safety in the jails” during a “difficult time of year for inmates.”
In a ruling just a week before Christmas in 2009, a federal judge agreed – saying the music served a valid non-religious purpose and didn’t primarily push religion on the inmates.
“Although Plaintiff asserts in his complaint that the purpose of the music was to force him to participate in a religious holiday, he does not explain how playing the music had a primary effect of advancing religion,” the judge wrote in the ruling. “To be sure, some of the music was religious, but the Supreme Court held [in earlier cases] that some advancement of religion does give rise to an Establishment Clause violation. A remote or incidental benefit to religion is not enough.”
