Slightly long. 5 piece rock band here, earlier this year a guitarist brought a song to us to work on. We went in studio and the producer used the intro that he wrote and we built a brand new song around it. We’ll call this song “Intro”. The followup riff for that intro piece we pulled and then wrote a brand new song around it, we’ll call that song “raven”. During the mixing and mastering process, the guitarist quit the band, however we promised to give writing and residual credits to him for “intro” and for “raven”. We shot a video for “intro” and it did very well in social media, YouTube and Spotify. We have spent the last 2 months in studio working on “Raven” and finally have it set to release next month. We dropped a teaser this week for it and last night he called our youngest guitarist and threatened an attorney if we released “Raven” because it was his “intellectual property” and he didn’t “didn’t give us permission to use it”.

I shot him a text asking what was going on because he gets writing credits and residuals from the songs perpetually and that he gave both myself and the bassist verbal permission that it was fine.

He then sends me a YouTube link to a video that is 12 years old, of him playing the original version of the piece with another band that has like 200 views on it. We completely reworked this song in studio but the intro riff that we are using for “Raven” is the same one that was the followup riff for “intro”. Does this guy have any kind of legal leg to stand on? He brought us music that he claimed was his original work that he clearly played with another band 12 years ago