Dua Lipa has avoided a lawsuit for her 2020 hit “Levitating.” A federal judge has ruled that the band who filed the suit, Artikal Sound System, wasn’t able to provide enough evidence that Lipa and her co-writers stole elements of their track, “Live Your Life.”
Videos by American Songwriter
The Artikal Sound System suit is one of two cases Lipa has faced in the past year. Songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer also accused Lipa of bolstering “Levitating” with elements from their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night.”
While the second lawsuit is still ongoing, the judge in the Artikal Sound System case decided that the two songs “bear little connection.”
“These attenuated links, which bear little connection to either of the two musical compositions at issue here, also do not suggest a reasonable likelihood that defendants actually encountered plaintiffs’ song, the judge wrote (per Billboard).
“Plaintiffs’ failure to specify how frequently they performed ‘Live Your Life’ publicly during the specified period, where these performances took place, and the size of the venues and/or audiences precludes the Court from finding that Plaintiffs’ live performances of the song plausibly contributed to its saturation of markets in which Defendants would have encountered it,” the judge continued.
Lipa’s “Levitating” spent more than 70 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song broke the record for longest-running song by a female artist on that particular chart, dethroning LeAnn Rimes who held the record for her 1997 hit “How Do I Live.”
The case dismissal comes on the heels of Lipa’s latest release, “Dance the Night.” The track is featured on the soundtrack for the impending Greta Gerwig film, Barbie. On top of contributing music to the film, the singer will act alongside leads Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
Elsewhere on the Barbie soundtrack are Lizzo, Ava Max, Charli XCX, Dominic Fike, Fifty Fifty, GAYLE, Ice Spice, Karol G, Khalid, Nicki Minaj, Pink Pantheress, and more.
(Photo by Cindy Ord/MG23/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
