News March 20, 2019

Rodgers & Hammerstein earning 90% of Ariana Grande’s ‘7 Rings’ royalties

Ariana Grande’s recent chart-topping single appears to be a financial success, though it’s not the singer who is receiving most of its spoils.

Back in January, Ariana Grande unleashed her single ‘7 Rings’. The second single from her fifth studio album, Thank U, Next, the tune was an almost immediate success, topping charts around the world, including here in Australia where it debuted at number one.

Needless to say, the song is a pretty big one. Not only did it break Spotify’s 24-hour streaming record with 14,966,544 streams, but it broke the service’s weekly global streaming record, and earned 23.6 million views on YouTube in just 24 hours.

With a huge tune like that, Ariana Grande is obviously raking it in, right? Well, not quite…

As The New York Times reports, the biggest winners from the success of ‘7 Rings’ happened to have died back in the ’60s and ’70s, with Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein receiving 90% of the royalties.

As listeners of the song would undoubtedly notice, ‘7 Rings’ features an interpolation of ‘My Favourite Things’, penned by Rodgers & Hammerstein for their 1959 production of The Sound Of Music.

Check out ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound Of Music:

According to The New York Times, representatives of Ariana Grande’s record label (Republic) bought the track before Concord, who have owned Rodgers & Hammerstein’s catalogue since 2017.

Concord reportedly requested 90% of the royalties to the song, with Grande’s representatives agreeing without any further negotiation.

Considering that the song lists a total of ten writers on the track, that this means that once again, many of those who worked on the track look set to receive a minimal payout for their work.

In related news, Ariana Grande’s ‘7 Rings’ was initially hit with claims of plagiarism, with Princess Nokia noting it sounds an awful lot like her track ‘Mine’.

Princess Nokia has since deleted her post calling out Grande, with others noting it also sounds similar to Soulja Boy’s ‘Pretty Boy Swag’, and 2 Chainz’s ‘Spend It’.