- Adam Stone released a song of the same name in 1989
- Stone wanted at least $20 million in damages
- Judge said songs simply shared “Christmas song clichés”
Mariah Carey has been cleared of any copyright infringement in a case over her 1994 Christmas hit, All I Want for Christmas is You.
Adam Stone – who performs under the stage name Vince Vance & The Valiants – filed a suit against Carey in a Los Angeles federal court in November 2023. As reported by the BBC, Stone released a song with the same name in 1989 and accused Carey of exploiting his “popularity” and “style”. He was claiming at least $20 million in damages.
Read more: How much Mariah Carey earns from All I Want For Christmas Is You
However, in a ruling issued on Wednesday 19 March 2025, a US Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani rejected the allegations of the songwriter.
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Almadani said the two songs simply shared “Christmas song clichés” that were common to several earlier hits and ordered Stone to repay the legal bills Carey incurred in defending the case.
Mariah Carey wrote the hit on a Casio keyboard
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, previously said of the two songs, “If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,”
However, in her 2020 memoir, Carey said she had composed “most of the song on a cheap little Casio keyboard”, while playing the movie It’s A Wonderful Life for inspiration, before completing it in the studio with her co-writer Walter Afanasieff.
Stone rejected that account and hoped to get a share in the song’s incredible success. All I Want For Christmas Is You is reported to earn its writers about $8.5 million every year.
Musicologist testified “no significant melodic similarities”
The defence team first asked the court to dismiss the case last August (2024), arguing that Stone had failed to establish copyright infringement. They wrote “The claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: A title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘mistletoe'”.
Judge Almadani endorsed reports from musicologists hired by Carey’s team. New York University professor Lawrence Ferrara testified there were “no significant melodic similarities” between the two tracks.
Ferrara said he found “at least 19 songs” with similar lyrics to Stone’s track, all released before Stone’s. Some of them were even titled All I Want For Christmas Is You.
Carey’s lawyers also submitted a report as evidence, but the court decided it couldn’t be used. This was mainly because the person who wrote the report had previously admitted, during a formal statement, that the two songs couldn’t be compared since “the rhythms are different”.
As a result, Almadani granted the motion to dismiss the case, meaning Carey is cleared of any wrongdoing.
In December 2019, 25 years after its release, the song hit No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time and has returned to the top spot every holiday season since. It holds the record for the most weeks (16 in total) at No. 1 for a Christmas song in Hot 100 history. It remains one of the best-selling holiday songs ever and was the first Christmas song to surpass 1 billion streams on Spotify.
