Avi Hirschfield says he found out his chorus was on a Drake record the same way everyone else did, by pressing play.
The Grammy winning songwriter claims he heard “Janice STFU” on Apple Music around May 15 and recognized the hook as his own, matching his work word for word and note for note.
Now he’s taking Drake and Universal Music Group to court. Hirschfield has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit alleging the song uses his original chorus without credit or compensation.
According to the complaint, the story starts in early January 2026. Hirschfield says he wrote and recorded vocals, lyrics, and a melody over instrumental tracks from FnZ, the production duo of Michael Mulé and Isaac De Boni.
He says he sent the finished recording to the producers and to other Drake collaborators. He claims nobody ever got back to him.
Hirschfield isn’t a stranger to Drake’s orbit. He’s known for his writing work on “Heated” from Beyoncé’s Renaissance, the track Drake also helped write, which makes this dispute feel less like a random claim and more like a fight inside a familiar circle.
The lawsuit leans heavily on what Hirschfield calls proof of timing. He alleges that stems backed by metadata show he composed and recorded the chorus before the song came out.
His side says that evidence was already put in front of the defendants. Hirschfield’s manager reportedly shared it, yet the complaint says Drake’s camp still refused to give him credit or a cut.
The response from the other side, at least as the filing describes it, went in the opposite direction. The complaint alleges Drake’s legal counsel sent Hirschfield a cease and desist letter instead of opening any kind of negotiation.
Drake and UMG haven’t laid out their version of events in the source material, and that matters. Studio sessions where producers send beats to multiple writers are routine, and disputes over who wrote what first often come down to files, timestamps, and how a court reads them.
The stakes are high because of how big this record is. The lawsuit itself calls “Janice STFU” Drake’s biggest hit in years, pointing to multiple weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and more than 300 million Spotify streams.
That success is exactly why the money question looms so large. Hirschfield is seeking profits, damages, and legal fees tied to the alleged infringement.
There’s also an awkward layer for Drake and UMG. Their relationship was already under strain after Drake sued the label for defamation in January 2025 over Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” a case a federal judge dismissed in October 2025 before Drake moved to appeal.
This time, the rapper and his label are named on the same side of the courtroom. What happens next likely depends on those stems, and on what FnZ and the other collaborators say about the files Hirschfield claims he sent them back in January.
