The legal battle between Fuerza Regida and its label Rancho Humilde is heating up, with a federal judge ruling he cannot immediately decide one of the core questions of the case.
In a decision Thursday (July 9), Judge Hernán D. Vera refused to dismiss Fuerza’s central claim against Rancho: That the música mexicana band should be freed from its 2018 record deal under California’s seven-year rule, which prohibits “exclusive services contracts” that run any longer than that.
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Rancho had argued that Fuerza willingly signed new record deals in 2021 and 2022, meaning they had restarted the seven-year clock. But in Thursday’s ruling, obtained and first reported by Billboard, Judge Vera said it was simply too early in the case to rule on that question.
“Although the court has the contracts and the timeline of when they were entered into, the court does not now have all of the facts regarding the circumstances of their negotiation in order to determine whether there was an intent to avoid the application of [the seven-year rule],” the judge wrote.
Rancho has been sparring in court for months with Fuerza, one of its top acts, which just scored a No. 2 album on the Billboard 200 with 111XPANTIA. Rancho sued first, claiming the band breached its record deal by unilaterally doing features for other artists and excluding it from lucrative deals with Apple Music and Live Nation. Fuerza then sued right back, seeking to terminate its record contract and accusing the label of trying to “sabotage” its success.
Fuerza Regida frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz (JOP) and Rancho Humilde CEO Jimmy Humilde took the dispute public last week, with each airing their grievances against the other in fiery Instagram posts.
Because Fuerza’s ongoing obligations to Rancho are a central question of the case, the debate over the seven-year rule (formally California Labor Code Section 2855) has become a major element of the litigation. In court filings, the band has called it its “most powerful” argument against the label.
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In seeking to dismiss that claim, Rancho argued that Section 2855 had not been designed to turn successive deals into a “single unified transaction.” It said Fuerza had voluntarily entered into the later contracts — noting that they came with a $1.8 million payment — and that the relationship had thus not yet crossed the seven-year threshold.
Fuerza argued back that it had still been locked into its Rancho deal when it signed the renewal, meaning it had not been a true free-market deal: “[Fuerza] had no ability to discover what any other label would have paid.”
In Thursday’s decision, Judge Vera said he was unable to decide the issue so early in the case. He noted that existing case law was unclear, and that he would need more evidence of the negotiations that led to Fuerza’s record deals before deciding the thorny issue: “The court thus denies the motion [to dismiss] Fuerza Regida’s claim for declaratory relief as to the parties’ rights under section 2855.”
Following the ruling, the case will proceed into more litigation, both on Fuerza’s claims against Rancho and the label’s accusations against the band. Barring a settlement, the two sides will exchange evidence, file more motions for a ruling, and then potentially head to an eventual jury trial.
The judge did dismiss some elements of Fuerza’s case against Rancho, including ruling that the band could not seek monetary damages under the seven-year rule. In a statement to Billboard, Rancho’s attorney Michael Trauben stressed that the ruling had “expressly recognized” that the band’s later agreements with the label are a core part of the dispute.
“From Rancho’s perspective, that is significant because Rancho has consistently maintained that this case cannot be reduced to a single 2018 recording agreement,” Trauben said. “Rather, it concerns a series of later negotiated agreements that fundamentally restructured the parties’ economic relationship.”
In his own statement to Billboard, Fuerza’s attorney Kenneth D. Freundlich said: “We are grateful that the judge rejected Rancho Humilde’s attempt to dismiss our California Labor Code Section 2855 claim. We are confident that when the issue is squarely presented to the judge, Fuerza will be free.”