Summer Walker Can Use This Law to Break Her Record Deal. But There’s a $50M Catch.
Categoria: Musica
Walker’s fight with Interscope highlights a California law also used by Fuerza Regida, H.E.R. and other stars — and the huge pitfalls for artists who invoke it.
Por Billboard | 15/10/2026
Summer Walker ’s dispute with Universal Music Group burst into public view last week, when the music giant sued her in Los Angeles court. But it really started in August, when she first notified the label that she was terminating her 2017 record contract. Or maybe it started way back in 1872, when California enacted strict time limits on labor contracts in the wake of the Civil War over concerns about involuntary servitude. Those rules evolved over the next 150 years (with a little help from a landmark ruling for Olivia DeHavilland) into the “seven-year rule,” which bars personal service contracts longer than — you guessed it. Related Summer Walker in Legal Dispute With Interscope Over Record Deal Hilary Duff to Receive Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year Award at 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit Judge Rules Woman Accused of Shooting at Rihanna & A$AP Rocky's Home Mentally Fit to Stand Trial It was that rule (formally California Labor Code Section 2855) that Walker invoked in August to break her deal with UMG’s Interscope. Fuerza Regida is also currently citing it in a legal battle with its label Rancho Humilde, and H.E.R. sued her longtime record label for release from her contract under the seven-year rule back in 2022. In Walker’s case, she signed her recording contract with Interscope in 2017 and — we’ll wait while you do the math — more than seven years have since elapsed. So she’s free? It’s not that straightforward. While any other contract would simply be terminated after seven years, record deals are treated uniquely under the law. Thanks to a 1987 exemption lobbied for by the music industry, labels can sue artists who break their deals on the seven-year rule, demanding lost profits from any contractually required albums they failed to deliver. That’s what Interscope did last week. In its lawsuit against Walker, the label alleged she had only released three of her contract’s five-album commitment. And given that each of those prior albums reached No. 1 or No. 2 on the Billboard 200 , Interscope says she owes a whopping $50 million in damages for failing to hand in the last two. The threat of that kind of costly lawsuit makes the seven-year rule far more difficult for musical artists to invoke than essentially any other worker in California: “Recording artists are the only people that get stuck in these deals,” says Dina LaPolt , a prominent artist attorney who has been an outspoken critic of the industry carveout. For record labels, that’s with good reason. Music deals have historically been built around a number of deliverable albums rather than a set length of time, and it’s hard to predict how long it will take for touring artists to produce new music. Labels say a hard time limit wouldn’t work for that structure and would force them to impose stricter delivery dates. The industry also argues that record companies spend lots of money on the front-end to develop and promote unheralded artists — to say nothing of literal adva