Post Malone (real name Austin Post) has settled with Tyler Armes, a professional musician who had accused Malone of failing to credit him on his hit 2019 song “Circles.” Armes claimed that he helped write “Circles” in an August 2018 jam session with Malone and Malone’s producer, Frank Dukes (real name Adam Feeney), after which Malone and Dukes refused to properly credit him as a co-writer or cut him into the song’s profits.
Two copyrights exist in every recorded song: the composition (the actual lyrics and music) and the sound recording (the specific studio version of the song). Previously, the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II, denied Malone and Duke’s motion to dismiss claims related to the song’s composition; however, he did dismiss Armes’s claims that he was a joint author of the sound recording after Armes conceded that the final version of the song was not produced during the jam session.
The jury was scheduled to be empaneled in Armes’s dispute over joint authorship of the composition, but with this settlement, the closest the would-be jurors will get to the case is streaming the contentious song.
Although Malone didn’t “take the blame,” he apparently had “a feeling that it’s time to let go.”
