Salt-N-Pepa Music Ownership Appeal: Irving Azoff Org Supports Duo, Blasts ‘Ill-Conceived’ Court Ruling

Salt-N-Pepa is getting support from Irving Azoff’s Music Artists Coalition (MAC) in litigation with Universal Music Group (UMG) over rights to the iconic hip-hop duo’s catalog of hits.

MAC submitted an amicus brief on Tuesday (April 7) to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit brought by Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandra “Pepa” Denton against the world’s largest music company. The dispute stems from UMG’s refusal to revert the rappers’ master recordings after they exercised the so-called “termination right,” a tenet of copyright law that allows creators to claw back their intellectual property decades after signing it away.

A New York federal judge ruled in January that Salt-N-Pepa has no termination rights because the duo was not actually a party to any of its 1986 contracts with Next Plateau Records, which has since been absorbed by UMG. These deals were executed by the duo’s music producer, Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, and do not say anywhere that Salt-N-Pepa owned its songs.

MAC, the advocacy group founded by Azoff in 2019 alongside artists like Don Henley, Dave Matthews and Anderson .Paak, warns in its amicus brief that the lower court’s decision creates a dangerous roadmap showing record labels and music publishers how to hold onto copyrights past the termination window.

“This ill-conceived rule makes it trivially easy for publishers or distributors to evade termination: By transferring rights to a new entity and ensuring an author is neither a party to nor an executor of the new grant, publishers and distributors can entirely insulate themselves from an author’s enforcement of statutory termination rights,” reads the brief. “Accepting such a rule would render decades of negotiation and eventual compromise between authors and distributors — as codified in the 1976 Act — entirely meaningless, nullifying the hard‑won protections the 1976 Copyright Act affords authors.”

MAC, joined by writer advocacy group Authors Alliance and legal organization Public Knowledge, says Congress explicitly created copyright termination to address creators’ inadequate leverage and compensation early in their careers. The brief notes, for example, that Bob Dylan received only a $100 advance in his first publishing deal in 1962, and Bruce Springsteen signed away his entire catalog to a manager in exchange for just 3% of royalties in 1972.  

Also on Tuesday, the National Society of Entertainment & Arts Lawyers (NSEAL) submitted its own amicus brief in support of Salt-N-Pepa. Authored by the New Orleans-based music attorney who recently won a landmark appellate ruling on the global reach of copyright termination, the brief focuses on the “work for hire” exception to termination rights.

Under copyright law, work created in the scope of employment is not eligible for termination. Though the lower court did not focus on this exception in the Salt-N-Pepa ruling, NSEAL argues that the decision implicitly determined — incorrectly — that the rappers were working for hire in 1986.

“Inherent in the district court’s conclusion that there was no ‘transfer of copyright ownership’ by Denton and James, is a determination that the subject recordings were ‘works made for hire,’” writes NSEAL. “Respectfully, making that determination without any factual development or legal explanation was reversible error, and the case should be remanded.”

Salt-N-Pepa’s lawyer, Richard Busch, praised both briefs in a statement to Billboard: “That these amazing groups of the top people in the industry filed these amicus briefs speaks volumes not only to the strength of this appeal but to its importance to all artists in the music industry.”

A rep for UMG did not return a request for comment on the amicus briefs on Wednesday (April 8). The company’s own appellate brief is due next month.