Location: Germany (me), Canada (former collaborator)
For the last five years I had a music project with a producer from Canada. We met in 2019 and started dating, when he convinced me to start a music project and make it 50/50 in terms of songwriting credit, production credit and money.
There was no formal contract about the 50/50 split but he made me reiterate this agreement multiple times on Facebook messenger, always under a premise that he’d abandon the project unless everything was 50/50.
Over time it became clear that he had no intention and no skill to write songs for the project so the split that might have seemed fair at the start started feeling more and more unequal. I approached this topic multiple times and always received threats of scraping the whole project if I refused to give him 50% of everything.
He proceeded to take 3 years to mix the songs with no success, constantly promising he’d finish in a couple of days. I ended up paying someone else to mix the songs out of my own pocket.
In the meantime I wrote and produced demos for around 15 new songs and he forced me to pledge those to the band with 50/50 songwriting credit as well, or else he would scrap the first record as well and leave me hanging.
Recently I finally found the strength to break up with him and tell him I was taking away my songs to re-record them from scratch.
Now he threatens to sue me for 500k CAD that he thinks he would have earned in these 5 years had he not signed up for this project. He also wants to sue me for the rights to my songs and legally forbid me to perform and re-record them. Additionally, he says the only way I wouldn’t have to pay him back would be if I stayed away from making music in the US and Canada for life.
Are there any grounds to these threats and is there something I can do here?