Tempo Music has filed a lawsuit against Miley Cyrus for allegedly copying Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man to create her 2023 hit Flowers.
Tempo, the music rights-acquiring fund launched by private equity giant Providence in 2019, says it acquired a percentage of the copyright in When I Was Your Man from Philip Lawrence, one of the song’s co-writers, in 2020.
The lawsuit not only names as defendants Miley Cyrus and Sony Music Entertainment, which owns the label on which Flowers was released, but also numerous music publishers allegedly involved with Flowers, plus retailers and streaming services that sold or hosted the song.
Flowers was the biggest-selling single globally in 2023, according to IFPI. It spent a total of eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and 57 weeks at the top of the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.
“Any fan of Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man knows that Miley Cyrus’ Flowers did not achieve all of that success on its own,” lawyers for Tempo Music said in a complaint filed with the US District Court for the Central District of California on Monday (September 16).
Flowers allegedly “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,” adds the complaint, which can be read in full here
As defendants, the lawsuit also names Flowers co-writers Gregory “Aldae” Hein and Michael Pollack.
Also named as defendants are Concord Music Publishing, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., and MCEO Inc., identified in court documents as a music publisher.
In an unusual move, the lawsuit also targets music streaming services and retailers that Tempo Music says sold either physical or digital copies of Flowers, or made it available for streaming.
That includes Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora, SoundCloud, TIDAL, and Xandrie, owner of the France-focused streaming service Qobuz.
Spotify is not named in the lawsuit, even though Flowers is available on the service, where it has clocked nearly 2.2 billion streams.
The lawsuit also targets retailers Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, which allegedly sold the song in stores or online.
It also names concert giant Live Nation, for “selling copies of the song through Cyrus’s official online store,” and Disney, for “releasing a documentary concert series featuring Cyrus’ performance of Flowers on March 10, 2023.”
On its release, many music listeners noted the lyrical similarities between Flowers and Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man, which was released a decade earlier and was a major hit in its own right, topping the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013. The track has been certified Platinum 11 times by the RIAA.
Some listeners suggested that the similarities between Flowers and Mars’ song were intentional. They noted that Miley Cyrus’ ex, Liam Hemsworth, is reportedly a fan of Bruno Mars, and that the lyrics of Flowers – which appear to be an inversion of the lyrics of When I Was Your Man – are “a kiss-off to Cyrus’ real-life ex.”
Tempo’s legal complaint notes those similarities in lyrics, including that the line in Mars’ song “I should have bought your flowers and held your hand” is echoed by the line “I can buy myself flowers, write my name in the sand” in Cyrus’ song.
However, the lawsuit goes further and alleges similarities beyond the lyrics, including an E-D-C-E-F chord progression in both songs.
“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,” the complaint states.
“Defendants knew or had reason to know that Flowers is an unauthorized derivative work based on When I Was Your Man… Defendants’ conduct has been, and continues to be, willful and knowing.”
The lawsuit seeks damages “in an amount to be determined at trial,” or otherwise the statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringement – a sum that could prove to be very large, given the high number of sales and streams of Flowers.Music Business Worldwide
