Key Points
- Dupri and his So So Def labels filed suit in Manhattan federal court on July 7.
- The complaint seeks more than $18 million, including over $10 million in interest.
- Named records span Mariah Carey, Usher, Kris Kross, Xscape and Da Brat.
- Suit says Sony hid Kris Kross royalties in a separate ledger for over 20 years.
Jermaine Dupri built So So Def into one of the defining hit factories of 1990s and early-2000s R&B and rap. Now he wants Sony Music Entertainment to account for what he says it never paid him. On July 7, Dupri, So So Def Recordings and So So Def Productions filed a complaint in Manhattan federal court seeking more than $18 million in unpaid royalties tied to some of the biggest records he produced, Variety reported.
The named catalog reads like a Dupri retrospective: Mariah Carey, Usher, Xscape, Kris Kross, Da Brat, Jagged Edge, Bow Wow, J-Kwon and Bone Crusher. According to the filing, Sony systematically underpaid producer and override royalties across a business relationship that stretches back roughly 32 years, and leaned on improper cross-collateralization to keep the money from flowing.
The sharpest allegation involves Kris Kross. Billboard reported that Sony never reported producer royalties from the duo's first two albums — including the platinum-selling Totally Krossed Out — until 2023, allegedly hiding them in a separate accounting system for more than two decades. Dupri says he is owed over $2 million from those records alone. The full $18 million figure includes more than $10 million in accrued interest, and the complaint asks for a jury trial. "SME knew that it was violating the contracts with the plaintiffs and never attempted to disclose its contemptuous accounting practices," the suit states, per Rolling Stone. Sony has not publicly commented.
The suit lands in the middle of a year in which ownership has become the whole game in music. Catalogs are being bought and sold again at 12–18x multiples, Sony's own publishing arm just absorbed Recognition Music Group's 45,000-song library, and legacy artists from Janet Jackson on down are re-papering their rights. Dupri's lawsuit is the other side of that boom: the producers and songwriters whose work underpins those valuations are now auditing three decades of label math — and finding, they argue, that the numbers were never clean to begin with. When catalogs are the asset, the accounting behind them stops being a back-office detail and becomes the fight itself.
Source: Variety, Billboard, Rolling Stone.
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