California's seven-year rule should count years, not albums

On 27 August, lawyers for Summer Walker sent Interscope Records a letter saying her 2017 contract was over. Forty-three days later, on Friday 9 October, Interscope filed suit in Los Angeles, asking for damages it says could pass $50 million. The timing was not a coincidence: Interscope has said the statutory deadline is what made it file.

The law in question is section 2855 of the California Labor Code, the "seven-year rule". For almost every worker in the state it does what the name says: a personal services contract cannot be enforced more than seven years after the work began. For one group of workers, it does something else. Since 1987, a recording artist who walks away at year seven can be sued for every album the contract said they would make and did not.

That carve-out is the whole fight, in Walker's case and in a second one running through a federal court in the same city. ADMC's position is simple: the seven-year rule should count years, not albums. California has already decided that once, and it was right the first time.

A clock that runs on records

Read the statute and the trick is plain. Subsection (a) sets the seven-year limit. Subsection (b), added in 1987, applies only to contracts for making records. It makes the artist give written notice before leaving, and it lets the label recover damages for each recording it was promised and did not receive, as long as it sues within 45 days of the date the artist said they would stop.

Walker's deal shows how that works in practice. According to Interscope's complaint, the joint deal she signed with the label and LVRN, the Atlanta company that built her career, called for five studio albums. The label counts three delivered: Over It in 2019, Still Over It in 2021 and Finally Over It, which came out on 14 November 2025. Two EPs, Last Day of Summer and CLEAR, do not count by the label's maths. So, nine years after she signed, the label says she owes two more albums, and the price of leaving is whatever a jury thinks those albums would have earned. Her lawyer, Keith Moten, has said she intends to defend the claims and remains open to a settlement. None of the label's allegations have been tested in court.

Think about what three albums in six years means. Each Over It record debuted in the top two of the US albums chart. This is not an artist who stopped working. It is an artist whose contract measures work in a unit she cannot produce on a schedule, and that the label partly controls: in most record deals, the label decides when an album is accepted, when it comes out and how much is spent on it.

The other way to stop the clock

If the album count is one way to keep an artist past seven years, the renewal is the other. That is the question in the case between Fuerza Regida, the San Bernardino band that grew from a covers act in 2015 into one of regional Mexican music's biggest names, and Rancho Humilde, the Los Angeles label that signed them.

The court record lays out the timeline. Rancho Humilde and Lumbre Music signed the band on 2 February 2018, after the corrido "Radicamos en South Central" drew attention that year. A new recording agreement took effect on 30 December 2021 with a $300,000 signing bonus. Two days later, on 1 January 2022, a settlement ended the 2018 deal and paid $1.8 million. In August 2022 the new deal was extended to at least 2027, alongside a global distribution agreement with Sony Music's US Latin division.

The band says seven years from February 2018 ran out no later than 1 February 2025. The label says the 2021 and 2022 paperwork started a fresh clock. On 9 July 2026, Judge Hernán D. Vera let the band's seven-year counterclaim go forward but declined to decide it, saying the court did not yet have the facts about how those later contracts were negotiated. Fuerza Regida meanwhile release new music through their own Street Mob Records, and this month gave Grand Theft Auto VI its single "Suzuki". The question of whose band they legally are is headed, unless someone settles, towards a jury.

Two very different artists, one R&B singer from Atlanta and one corrido band from the Inland Empire, and the same problem. In both cases the seven years are real on paper and soft in practice.

California already ruled on this, in 1944

The seven-year rule is famous because of an actor, not a singer. Olivia de Havilland's contract with Warner Bros. let the studio suspend her whenever she turned down a role and add the suspended time to the end of her term. She sued in August 1943. On 8 December 1944, a California appeals court ruled unanimously that seven years meant seven calendar years, and that a studio could not stretch the clock by adding time on the back.

An album count is the same move with a different unit. Warner Bros. measured de Havilland's obligation in months worked. Labels measure an artist's in records delivered. In both cases the employer decides how fast the unit accrues, and in both cases the clock stops when the employer wants it to. The court saw through it once. In 1987 the legislature handed labels a version of that stretch back, and only for musicians.

Artists have spent nearly four decades trying to reverse that. On 23 January 2002, Carole King went to Sacramento with Don Henley, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks, Tom Morello and others to back Senate Bill 1246, which would have removed the exception. It was withdrawn. Twenty years later Assembly Bill 983, the FAIR Act, reached the State Senate's judiciary committee and failed on 28 June 2022 with four votes, two short of the six it needed.

The labels' case, taken seriously

The other side has a real argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. A label pays advances and recording costs up front, sometimes for years, before an artist earns anything back. The album count is what that money buys. Without the 1987 clause, opponents of the 2022 bill argued, an artist could sign, take the money, deliver slowly and leave at year seven owing nothing. The California Chamber of Commerce, which opposed AB 983, said the music business contributes $39.5 billion to the state's economy and more than 430,000 jobs, and warned that the bill would drain $400 million to $600 million and shrink advances for new and diverse artists.

That deserves an answer, and it has one. First, nobody is proposing that labels lose what they lent: an unrecouped advance is a debt in any contract, and courts can enforce debts. What the 1987 clause adds is the right to sue for profits on albums that do not exist, which is a far larger and far more speculative number. "More than $50 million" for two unmade records is not a refund. It is a toll.

Second, the warning about investment has been tested in a market with no such clause. In 2009, the same year three members of TVXQ went to court over 13-year contracts, South Korea's Fair Trade Commission issued a standard exclusive contract for entertainers that capped terms at seven years, counted in years. K-pop, an industry that pays for years of trainee development before an idol earns a won, did not collapse. It grew into a global export, and seven years became the reference point for idol contracts.

Third, the clause is a bad deal even for labels that want artists to stay. A singer who knows her exit costs two albums at a jury's valuation has every reason to stop recording for the company that holds the bill. Nobody gets music that way.

What should change

The fix is short. Repeal subsection (b)'s per-album damages, keep the notice requirement, and let labels recover unrecouped advances and proven breaches during the term like any other employer. Add a line saying that a renewal signed while an artist is still under an exclusive deal with the same company does not restart the seven years, which is the Fuerza Regida question answered in a sentence.

Walker's two missing albums are, for now, worth more to Interscope as a court claim than they will ever be worth to anyone as music, because the law prices records that nobody will make. The de Havilland court understood that a contract which can always be extended is not a contract with a term at all. California should give musicians the same calendar everyone else in the state already works by.