On March 25, 2025, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and his label, Flawless Records (Flawless), filed a new lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) in California state court in Los Angeles. By way of background, Limp Bizkit has been pursuing an action against UMG in federal court for some time. On March 17, 2025, the federal court judge dismissed part of the case against UMG on jurisdictional grounds. However, the judge did not dismiss the copyright infringement claims. In response to the dismissal of part of the federal case, Durst refiled the case in state court.
Durst alleges that in 2024, after he retained a new team of representatives, they discovered that millions of dollars in royalties were due to Limp Bizkit from deals with Flip Records (Flip), Interscope, and a joint venture with Flawless.
Although many of the claims in the new state court action mimic the federal court case, there are some new allegations. The federal court action involves claims of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and fraudulent concealment. A new claim in the state court action is that UMG breached the deals in dispute, thus they are null and void. Consequently, Limp Bizkit contends that it owns its masters.
The new state court action also makes allegations against Jordan Schur, who was the founder of Flip and former President of Geffen Records. The Complaint states that Schur misrepresented that Durst would be a 50-50 partner of Flip and receive 10 percent of the profits from artists he signed and discovered, including the group Staind.
According to the state court Complaint: “For a period of time, Schur did, in fact, remit to Durst 10 percent of the profits received in relation to Staind, confirming the existence of the deal. However, beginning in approximately 2012 and continuing until 2024, Schur repeatedly told Durst that he was not receiving any more money with respect to Staind, and stopped remitting any profits to Durst.”
Another issue is an alleged ambiguous definition of “new medium” in the earliest contracts, which allegedly means Limp Bizkit is due millions of dollars in streaming profits. The suit also contends UMG committed accounting errors.
According to the state court suit, “these same issues, including but not limited to applying negative royalty rates, negative units, negative royalty earnings, incorrect royalty rates, incorrect unit pricing, and the failure to account for or calculate 50 percent of net receipts, appear across all of the accounting statements that Plaintiffs have access to and are not limited to those accounts that are supposedly still unrecouped.”
Plaintiffs also contend that they are continuing to find problems with the “grossly overinflated” total of $43 million in advances and recoupable costs attributed to Limp Bizkit. According to the suit, the actual amount is closer to $13 million.
The total amount of advances should be easy to prove in court. But the determination of recoupable costs will be much more complicated.
GLENN LITWAK is a veteran entertainment attorney based in Santa Monica, CA. He has represented platinum selling recording artists, Grammy winning music producers, hit songwriters, management and production companies, music publishers and independent record labels. Glenn is also a frequent speaker at music industry conferences around the country, such as South by Southwest and the Billboard Music in Film and TV Conference. Email Litwak at gtllaw59@gmail.com or visit glennlitwak.com.
