After making waves for his “anaconda pic“, Jason Derulo has been really been pumping out content on TikTok lately, most notably chipping his tooth while doing some dumb corn-eating challenge. But it seems like Jason Derulo’s TikTok shenanigans may have landed him in some hot water this time as there’s some controversy over claims that he lifted a sample off New Zealand TikTok user, Joshua Nanai, for his song, ‘Savage Love’.
Speaking of TikTok, the GOAT team talk about how it could be the next big thing for music on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
Joshua Nanai has been making waves on TikTok for his music (under the name Jawish 685), with his track ‘Laxed (Siren Beat)’ going viral on the platform and being seen by millions of users. The amount of attention garnered by the song resulted in a lot of interest in the 17-year-old New Zealander from major music labels and he reportedly signed with Columbia Records (as per the NZ Herald)
Things get a little messier after Jason Derulo chimed in on all this with his new song ‘Savage Love’. The R&B star shared a clip of ‘Savage Love’ to his 20 million TikTok followers and many notice how he sampled a snippet of ‘Laxed (Siren Beat)’ for it without giving credit to Nanai.
After being called out for it, Derulo then shared a follow up ‘Savage Love’ post that credits Nanai in the caption: “Had fun remixing @jawsh_685 siren beat #SavageLove summer vibes.”
Here’s where it gets messy. According to Variety, Jason Derulo dropped his ‘Savage Love’ sample while Nanai was still negotiating a deal with Columbia Records and didn’t wait for the proper okay to sample ‘Laxed (Siren Beat)’. Apparently Derulo wanted ‘Savage Love’ to be a “Jason Derulo” song with Nanai as the producer but no agreement was officially reached.
Variety reports that no agreement over compensation has been reached at the time of writing though Derulo is supposedly in touch with Nanai, though the NZ Herald reports that Nanai is being paid for the use of his song.
While the whole compensation stuff is all a bit hazy, Twitter and TikTok users still aren’t too happy over how Jason Derulo sampled Nanai’s track without giving proper credit.
“Give credit to the NZ producer that made the original beat,” wrote one Twitter user. Another wrote, “You not slick Jason Dorito, we seen you delete it the first time cos it was getting flooded with hate, Make sure you give love ($) to jawsh365 for the beat you ripped.”
While Derulo has yet to respond to these claims at the time of writing, Nanai is sounding upbeat with everything that’s happening. In a statement to the NZ Herald, the teenager says he’s “feeling thankful for all of the support so far” and “focusing on all the positive things to come and getting Manurewa 67 on the map! Keep it loud and styla.”
With so much drama going on due to his TikTok shenanigans, maybe Jason Derulo should just save himself (and his poor tooth) a heap of trouble by forgetting his TikTok password for a bit (or just delete it altogether) and laying low for a while.
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