Why is Mariah Carey getting sued again? All you need to know about $20M lawsuit over “All I Want for Christmas Is You”

Mariah Carey released her hit song All I Want for Christmas Is You on October 29, 1994, as part of her Christmas album, Merry Christmas. The song, written in collaboration with Walter Afanasieff, propelled the singer as one of the foremost Christmas singers, earning her the moniker Queen of Christmas.

But the singer is now under fire for that very single. Andy Stone, a singer-songwriter who goes as Vince Vance and the Valiants, is suing the singer for $20 million, claiming that the singer copied his song of the same name. The information from the court documents, reported upon exclusively by People Magazine, points to the compositional structure and other similarities between the two songs:

"All I Want for Christmas Is You" received radio play in 1993 and became a hit on Billboard's Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart the following year, around the same time Carey's now-classic festive anthem was released."

The report continues:

"Lawyers for the plaintiffs claim Carey and her collaborators "undoubtedly had access" to Stone's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" at the time of writing her homonymous song "given its wide commercial and cultural success."

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Mariah Carey All I Want for Christmas Is You lawsuit

This is not the first time Mariah Carey has been sued over her popular song, All I Want for Christmas Is You, by Andy Stone AKA Vince Vance and the Valiants. Last year, Stone filed a similar lawuit against Carey, only to drop the lawsuit five months later.

There has not been any further clarification from Stone as to why he refiled the lawsuit this year and neither has Mariah Carey responded to the news of the lawsuit publicly on social media or via news media.

Speaking exclusively to Deadline magazine on June 3, 2022, Los Angeles lawyer and expert on music and intellectual property law Pamela Koslyn noted that Stone had a difficult time establishing Carey's copyright in the initial complaint.

Koslyn said,

"Song titles aren’t entitled to copyright protection. That’s why there are 177 works using the same title. An even more popular title is “My Baby,” which has 4860 works registered with the Copyright Office. And that doesn’t even count “common law” (unregistered) works using the same title.”

The new lawsuit claims that a copyright violation occurred because of the similarities in compositional structure between Andy Stone's song and Mariah Carey's, as well as the time between their writing and release. However, in this particular case, the similarities in compositional structure do not prove a violation of copyright.

Holiday songs such as the two in question here frequently follow a similar structure based on earlier Gospel and faith music traditions. The chord and rhythm progression of modern Christian or holiday music have been noted to have a deep similarity with each other.

As the Mockingbird blog points out in its report on Christian music, the themes of hopefulness and sorrow tie all such music together, holiday or otherwise:

"This is why all Christian music sounds the same, even when it doesn’t. Whether a song is a funeral requiem, a praise chorus, a medieval processional, a communion anthem, or a heart-wrenching confession, there is an underlying hopefulness for which the Gospel allows."

Mariah Carey released her holiday album, Merry Christmas, on October 28, 1994. The multi-platinum certified album was a major success, peaking as a chart-topper on the Japanese album chart.