Mr Eazi Accuses Bad Bunny Of Copyright Infringement For Not Crediting Joeboy On ‘Enséñame A Bailar’
Mr Eazi has called out Bad Bunny for not crediting Joeboy on his single “Enséñame A Bailar.”
“Yo @sanbenito you need to tell your lawyers to stop messing around and clear that Joeboy rip off on your album,” wrote in a tweet to the Puerto Rican rapper. In a follow-up tweet, Mr Eazi posted YouTube links to two tracks — Joeboy’s “Empty My Pocket,” which was produced by Dëra, and Bad Bunny’s “Enséñame a Bailar,” off his Album of the Year Grammy-nominated Un Verano Sin Ti. “Incase you are not sure what song I’m talking about… Ain’t no way you produced and sang an Afrobeat record,” the Nigerian Afrobeats singer wrote.
Joeboy and Dëra are both under Mr Eazi’s record label emPawa Africa. The “Patek” hitmaker claims he’s been trying to resolve this issue privately with Bad Bunny and his record label Rimas Music for nine months. “The team at emPawa Africa have attempted to sort this issue amicably since May of last year with our mutual legal teams,” Mr Eazi said in a statement released yesterday (Feb. 9). “But the intent of Rimas Music is clearly to blatantly appropriate young African creators’ work for their gain without attribution.”
“Our asks have been the same since the beginning,” Ikenna Nwagboso, co-founder and head of label services, distribution and publishing at emPawa Africa added. “Give Joeboy his credit, publishing and royalties on the song, and give Dëra a producer credit.”
“Unfortunately this is part of a broader pattern we see in how the wider music industry approaches the intellectual property of African artists,” Mr Eazi continued. “Afrobeats has become a global phenomenon and everybody wants to sample a piece of it. Unfortunately, Afrobeats artists, their producers and labels often have to pursue legal means to secure publishing and royalties after songs they originally created are co-opted without credit by other artists.”
In 2019, Mr Eazi and the “Tití Me Preguntó” hitmaker collaborated on “Como Un Bebé,” from J Balvin and Bad Bunny’s joint album, Oasis. That track was produced by Legundury Beatz, who is also Nigerian.
“I founded emPawa Africa to protect and support African creative entrepreneurs and artists with a virtuous ecosystem believing that Afrobeats and Afropop would be today what we wished then it would become,” Mr Eazi concluded in the statement. “We will not accept Bad Bunny and Rimas denying Joeboy and Dëra credits and a share in the ownership of a song they wrote, composed and, in Joeboy’s case, even performed on.”
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