Beyoncé responds after Right Said Fred claim she didn’t ask permission to use their song
Beyoncé’s team have responded after Right Said Fred claimed that the singer used their song without “approaching” them.
Earlier this week the pop duo criticised the use of their 1992 hit song “I’m Too Sexy”, which is sampled on Beyoncé’s track “ALIEN SUPERSTAR”.
"Normally the artist approaches us but Beyoncé didn’t because she is such an arrogant person, she just had probably thought ‘come and get me’, so we heard about it after the fact when you did,” they said speaking at the 2022 BMI Awards.
“But everyone else, Drake and Taylor Swift – they came to us. To use our melody they need our permission so they send us the demo and we approve it and if so we get a co-write credit.
“With this Beyoncé thing there are 22 writers. It’s ridiculous so we would get about 40p,” the brothers added.
The 1990s group were referring to the use of their song on Drake’s “Way 2 Sexy” and Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do”.
On Friday (7 October), Beyonce’s team responded to the comments, expressly denying the accusations.
"The comments made by Right Said Fred stating that Beyoncé used ‘I’m Too Sexy’ in ‘Alien Superstar’ without permission are erroneous and incredibly disparaging,” the singer’s team wrote in a statement to The Sun.
"Permission was not only granted for its use, but they publicly spoke of their gratitude for being on the album.”
The team also explained that only the composition of the song was used on Beyoncé’s track, not the sound recording.
"Permission was asked of their publisher on 11 May 2022 and the publisher approved the use on 15 June 2022. They were paid for the usage in August 2022.”
The team denied that the band only had a small portion of the copyright percentage, suggesting they had a “substantial portion” of the song: "Collectively the Right Said Fred writers own more than any other singular writer and have co-writer credit. This accusation is false," they summarised.
“ALIEN SUPERSTAR” is the third track on Beyoncé’s latest album Renaissance. The song has already had over 73 million streams.
This isn’t the first time Beyoncé has got into a battle over copyright issues on her recent album. Earlier this year BeyonceÌ removed part of Kelis’s “Milkshake” from her song “Energy” after Kelis claimed she was sampled without permission.
