Taylor Swift has reached an agreement with the two songwriters who claimed her 2014 smash hit Shake It Off contains lyrics stolen from them.
As reported by Variety, both Taylor Swift and the songwriters Nathan Butler and Sean Hall have now asked a judge to dismiss the case, indicating that both parties have reached an agreement.
This brings the lengthy legal battle — originally filed against Swift in 2017 — to a close. At the time, Butler and Hall accused the “Shake It Off” songwriter of stealing lyrics from a song they wrote for the American girl group 3LW called “Playas Gon’ Play,” released in 2000.
Butler and Hall believe that Swift pinched the “playas gon’ play / and haters, they gon’ hate” lines from 3LW’s R&B/hip hop track for her track’s catchy hook “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
Swift vehemently denied the claims, stating in a court declaration that “The lyrics to ‘Shake It Off’ were written entirely by me.” and that “I recall hearing phrases about players play and haters hate stated together by other children while attending school in Wyomissing Hills, and in high school in Hendersonville.”
Swift also pointed out that the phrase “haters gonna hate” is common enough that she had worn a commercially-available T-shirt with these words printed on it at a concert in 2013.
The details of the settlement between Swift’s party and Butler and Hall’s were not specified in the court documents, and the writing credits for the song remained the same at the time of this article’s publication, with Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellback still listed as the track’s writers.
