Ricardo Montaner has taken Universal Music Group to court over who owns the master recordings of his earliest albums.
The Argentine-Venezuelan singer, suing alongside his company Montaner Legacy Music LLC, has brought parallel cases in the United States and Venezuela, arguing that Universal has no valid claim to five albums he recorded between 1986 and 1992.
Named as defendants in the US suit are Universal Music Group N.V. and Universal Music Publishing Venezuela (UMPV).
Those albums, Ricardo Montaner, Ricardo Montaner 2, Un Toque de Misterio, En el Último Lugar del Mundo, and Los Hijos del Sol, feature songs that reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hot Latin Songs chart, among them La Cima del Cielo, Castillo Azul, and Piel Adentro.
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Monday (June 29), was first reported by Billboard and can be read in full here.
According to the filing, Montaner signed with Venezuelan label Love Records in November 1986 and recorded the five albums for it over the following six years.
He alleges that a 1993 settlement, a finiquito under Venezuelan law, annulled that deal and returned all rights in the albums to him.
The complaint says a now-defunct UMG subsidiary, Universal Music Venezuela (UMV), claimed in 2001, after what it describes as a series of acquisitions and assignments, to have inherited Love Records’ rights, and signed a distribution deal with Montaner that itself named him as the albums’ sole owner.
UMG dissolved that subsidiary in December 2022.
Montaner alleges that neither UMV nor its parent, UMG, ever paid him “any royalties whatsoever” under the 2001 deal.
He served notice terminating the agreement in 2022, with the termination set to take effect on July 1, 2024.
Under US copyright law, termination lets creators recover work they signed away decades earlier.
The complaint says UMG and its affiliates disputed the validity of those notices, and Montaner responded with a second termination notice in 2024.
Once the termination took effect, Montaner licensed the albums to Legacy, which signed a distribution deal with ADA Latin in June 2025.
Then, on April 22, 2026, UMG wrote to ADA Latin, purportedly on behalf of UMPV, claiming that UMPV owns the albums and demanding that the distributor stop selling or exploiting them “in any manner.” A further letter went to Legacy in May.
ADA Latin is the trading name of Warner Music Latina, a Warner Music Group company.
WMG is not named as a defendant and stands accused of no wrongdoing.
A representative for Montaner declined to comment beyond the filings; UMG and WMG did not respond to Billboard’s requests for comment.
Montaner and Legacy are asking the court to “declare that Montaner is the rightful owner of the albums” and to bar the defendants from interfering with the plaintiffs’ right to exploit them “in any way they choose.”
They are also seeking monetary damages.
According to the filing, the plaintiffs’ calculable damages already exceed USD $1 million and are “continuing to accrue.”
Montaner began re-recording his early albums in 2024, and told Billboard at the time that the “contracts at that time were predatory and totally disadvantageous for the artist.” He said he had never earned royalties from those recordings and wanted his catalog to pass to his children.
The case isn’t the only recent lawsuit against UMG over a termination rights claim.
Salt-N-Pepa went after the company in 2025, trying to recover the masters to recordings they made in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
UMG argued that the duo had no rights to terminate, and a judge dismissed the case in January, ruling that Salt-N-Pepa never owned the copyrights.
Salt-N-Pepa filed an appeal in April.
Termination rights are also at the center of a fight the majors have taken to the US Supreme Court.
Last month, UMG was among the major music companies that, together with BMG, asked the court to overturn a ruling that lets songwriters reclaim the worldwide rights to their songs under American law.
In a petition filed on June 11, the rightsholders argued that the decision – which held that a songwriter reclaiming rights recaptures them worldwide, not only in the US – would unleash “chaos” on the industry if left to stand.
Montaner, for his part, is pressing his own termination claim across two countries at once.Music Business Worldwide
