Bieber producer sues over points dispute

completemusicupdate.com:

Australian producer and sound engineer Chris ‘Tek’ O’Ryan has sued Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun and the company JRC Entertainment over allegations promises were broken regarding producer royalties on a number of Bieber tracks that he helped produce.According to Billboard, O’Ryan’s lawsuit says that his work on the Bieber tracks was to “polish and finesse” the vocals, a role that is often played down in the music industry because artists are nervous of being accused of requiring studio tricks to fix their singing.But this work is “indispensable to modern pop music”, the legal filing argues, adding “the level of attention to detail required … cannot be overstated, often involving timing and pitch shifts measured in mere fractions of a millisecond or semitone, with individual words split into dozens of manipulable pieces before being expertly reassembled”.The dispute relates to an email exchange with Bieber’s management team in 2018 when the producer sought to change his payment terms so that he’d get a royalty right in addition to an upfront fee.

That royalty right would be a single ‘point’, so basically one percent of monies generated by the recording.O’Ryan says that Bieber’s reps initially accepted that proposal, after which he worked on the star’s ‘Justice’ album.