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The Weeknd sued over alleged The Hills sample

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 11 December 2015

The Weeknd has been sued by Cutting Edge Music for allegedly sampling without permission the score to the 2013 film ‘The Machine’, which the plaintiff controls.

The sample apparently appears on The Weeknd’s track ‘The Hills’, the second single from the Canadian producer’s ‘Beauty Behind The Madness’ album. It seems that Cutting Edge is only really aware of this because producer Emmanuel ‘Mano’ Nickerson, who also worked on the track, tweeted the composer of ‘The Machine’ score about it.

In legal papers filed this week, the tweet from Mano to Tom Raybould is included, and reads: “I sampled your music, might make it 2 The Weeknd next album. Huge fan of what u did 4 The Machine movie!”

But, it seems, despite Mano’s excitement over sampling Raybould’s score, no licensing deal was then sought by The Weeknd’s label.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the lawsuit goes on to say that both Raybould’s score and The Weeknd’s track “feature synthesiser bass-lines performed with almost identical idiosyncratic sounds at the same register and using the same pitch sequence, melodic phase structure and rhythmic durations”.

The Weeknd, Mano and various labels and publishers are all defendants in the case.

If The Weeknd sample disputes involving ‘machines’ sound familiar, that’s because in 2013 he was accused of using a sample of Portishead track ‘Machine Gun’ on his song ‘Belong To The World’ after permission had been denied. The claim never went legal, and The Weeknd’s label Universal/Republic apparently denied that there was any sample used, with The Weeknd himself saying that he had merely been “inspired” by the Portishead track.