Bittersweet Symphony Lawsuit: Ashcroft’s Royalties and 2019 Reversal

The Bitter Sweet Symphony lawsuit was a copyright dispute over The Verve’s 1997 hit, which sampled a 1965 orchestral recording of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time.” ABKCO Records, which controlled the Stones’ early publishing, argued that The Verve had used more of the recording than their license permitted. The band settled out of court, surrendered 100 percent of the song’s royalties and publishing, and lost their songwriting credit to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. More than two decades later, in 2019, Jagger and Richards voluntarily returned the rights to Richard Ashcroft.

The Sample and the License

The Verve built “Bitter Sweet Symphony” around a looping string passage lifted from a 1965 orchestral version of “The Last Time” recorded by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra and arranged by David Whitaker.¹ Before the song’s release, the band obtained a license from Decca Records to use a five-note segment of that recording. In exchange, they agreed to hand over 50 percent of the song’s royalties.²

That arrangement did not survive the song’s success.

ABKCO’s Claim and Why The Verve Settled

Once the track became a global hit, Allen Klein moved in. Klein, the Rolling Stones’ former manager, controlled the band’s early catalog through ABKCO Records.¹ He alleged that The Verve had used a far larger portion of the orchestral recording than the five-note segment the license had covered.³ ABKCO filed a plagiarism suit on behalf of Klein, Jagger, and Richards.²

The band was told the song could be pulled from stores. They settled. The terms were unusually harsh: 100 percent of the royalties and publishing rights went to ABKCO, and songwriting credit was reassigned to Jagger and Richards, with Ashcroft’s name either removed or reduced to a subordinate position.³ The deal was reached privately, not through a court judgment.⁴

Separately, in 1999, Andrew Loog Oldham sued The Verve for roughly $1.7 million in songwriter royalties tied to the original orchestral recording he had produced, and for years payments were directed to Oldham, Jagger, and Richards.²

What the Settlement Cost Ashcroft

The financial numbers give the clearest picture of the outcome. According to Billboard, Ashcroft received a total of just $1,000 in publishing money from “Bitter Sweet Symphony” over more than two decades, while the song generated an estimated $5 million in publishing revenue from sales, synchronization, and other licensing.⁵

The credit transfer had consequences beyond money. When the song was nominated for a Grammy for best song, the nomination went to Jagger and Richards.³

ABKCO also exercised its new publishing rights commercially. In early 1998, it licensed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to Nike for a television commercial without The Verve’s consent. Nike paid $700,000; ABKCO took $350,000 and the band received $175,000. The band’s manager, Jazz Summers, said at the time that “The Verve are a rock band, and they don’t think their music should be used to endorse things.” To keep ABKCO from licensing re-recorded versions to other advertisers, the band agreed to let Nike use the original master, then donated their share to the Red Cross Land Mine Appeal and publicly asked ABKCO to do the same.⁶

How Ashcroft Got the Rights Back in 2019

The turning point came through management channels. In early 2019, Ashcroft’s managers, John Kennedy and Steve Kutner, approached ABKCO’s Jody Klein, Allen Klein’s son. Klein directed them to Joyce Smyth, the Rolling Stones’ manager, who put the request to Jagger and Richards. They agreed.⁷

In April 2019, Jagger and Richards signed over all of their publishing rights in the song, agreed to remove their names from the songwriting credits, and transferred future royalties to Ashcroft.⁴ Ashcroft announced the news on May 23, 2019, while accepting an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. He called it a “remarkable and life-affirming turn of events” made possible by “a kind and magnanimous gesture from Mick and Keith,” and said he had never held a “personal beef” with the Stones.³

The Rolling Stones acknowledged the weight of what had been lost. “Of course there was a huge financial cost but any songwriter will know that there is a huge emotional price greater than the money in having to surrender the composition of one of your own songs,” the band said in a statement. “Richard has endured that loss for many years.”³

Ashcroft now holds sole songwriting credit and receives all future royalties. The song has sold more than 1.27 million copies in the UK alone.³

What the Case Did and Didn’t Change in Copyright Law

Because the dispute settled privately, it produced no court ruling and set no binding precedent. Its influence has been cautionary rather than doctrinal. The World Intellectual Property Organization has pointed to it as a prominent example of what can go wrong when a sample is not fully cleared, alongside Vanilla Ice’s loss of royalties for “Ice Ice Baby” to Queen and David Bowie.⁸

The sampling law that developed around the dispute came from other cases. In the United States, the Sixth Circuit’s 2005 ruling in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films established that any intentional sampling of a copyrighted sound recording is infringement, no matter how short or unrecognizable the sample.⁹ The Ninth Circuit later split from that view in VMG Salsoul (2016), holding that a de minimis exception can apply if an average listener would not recognize the borrowed material.¹⁰

In the UK, where The Verve was based, infringement turns on whether a “substantial part” of a work has been copied, and courts have found that even short samples can meet that threshold. The 1999 case Produce Records v. BMG Entertainment rejected the industry’s informal “three-second rule,” treating a 7.5-second sample as plainly arguable infringement.¹¹ Because most UK sampling disputes settle rather than reach judgment, rights holders retain heavy leverage in clearance negotiations, and labels tend to treat any deliberate use of a master recording as requiring a license even where the legal case would be weak.¹²

1
Elsewhere. The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra: The Last Time (1965)
2
NPR. Not Bitter, Just Sweet: The Rolling Stones Give Royalties to The Verve
3
BBC News. Bitter Sweet Symphony: Ashcroft Gets Rights Back
4
The Guardian. Bitter Sweet Symphony Royalties Return to Richard Ashcroft
5
Billboard. Bitter Sweet Symphony Saga: How Richard Ashcroft Lost and Won Songwriting Rights
6
The Verve Live. Infamous Nike Commercial
7
NME. Richard Ashcroft’s Manager Reveals How Rolling Stones Returned Rights to Bitter Sweet Symphony
8
WIPO Magazine. The Song Remains the Same: A Review of the Legalities of Music Sampling
9
Indiana Law Journal. Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films Analysis
10
Washington University Law Review. De Minimis Exception in Sound Recording Sampling
11
Mondaq. The Song Remains the Same: Music Sampling in the Digital Age
12
Leeds Beckett University. Copyright Management and Its Effect on the Sampling Practice of UK Dance Music Producers