Jermaine Edwards’ buoyant anthem “Thank You for Sunshine” has become one of the island’s most exported inspirational tracks of the last decade, with multiple mutations, samples, flips, reposts and remixes. However, as the song collects new audiences, the ownership of the track has become blurry with multi-platinum singer Akon making claims that he paid one million for a demo version of the song.
“Early 2012, I had an internet leak and 10 years later,” Alone stated in an interview late last year. “I was strolling through my feed and I saw this little kid and he sound like an angel singing a song and I said wait that is one of my demos and I said we had to reach out to the kid that made it what it was and we realize he was going from a school in Jamaica. Come to find out he is not a kid anymore, he is in his early 20s now.”
Akon added, “Was like listen we gonna go back to the school he did it, we gonna refurbish the school, the first million from the song will go to him and on top of that he gonna get writer’s credit through that whole process.”
The story Akon told is of his Beautiful Day which has surpassed 15 million streams on Spotify since its 2024 release is compelling but it is everything but true. As the song was neither a demo neither did he pay one million to anyone for the song.
“It started causing a lot of confusion,” Jermaine says. “People have been barging my YouTube page like: ‘Who stole the song? Is this Akon’s song or is this your song?’”
The rumor, he says, first circulated online in late 2024. Then it resurfaced again in 2025, revived by reposts and retellings and the old misinformation has become a fresh crisis.
What bothered Edwards wasn’t only the money figure, dramatic as it sounds. It was what the claim implied: that “Thank You for Sunshine” was a leaked demo reclaimed by chance, not a song created intentionally; that authorship was uncertain; that the origin story had become negotiable.
“It was said in a way to say it was a demo that was leaked,” Jermaine says. “Years later I heard it back and the little boy was bad and all of this. It just didn’t make any sense.”
Jermaine says he cold retire from music now due to the success of the track but that fog of ownership threatens to swallow the truth of how the song came to be which he explains exclusively to WMV.
A Song Born for Sunshine — and Brand Work
“Thank You for Sunshine” wasn’t initially written as an internet moment. It wasn’t created with virality in mind. It didn’t start out as a remix challenge or a global sound bite.
“I actually just got signed to Digicel as a brand,” he says, describing what he calls a landmark move: becoming the first gospel artist to serve as a brand ambassador for the company.
“I needed an upbeat song,” he adds.
In the studio, he pulled from scripture, from the kind of instruction many believers struggle with when life turns sharp: gratitude even when gratitude feels impossible.
“The scripture says, ‘In everything give thanks,’” Jermaine says. “Even though a lot of persons didn’t like to say thanks for pain — but it started from in everything. We thank God for the good, we thank God for the bad.”
Then the chorus, simple enough to be sung by a child and strong enough to hold a storm:
Lord, I thank you for sunshine, thank you for rain, thank you for joy, thank you for everything…
“It’s a beautiful day,” Jermaine says. “So we’re not complaining about anything that was happening.”
The Child Who Carried It Further Than the Artist Could
It might have stayed a successful local release. But the song found another engine: a classroom.
Rushawn Ewears, Jermaine says, was a schoolboy at the time — one who admired him deeply.
“I was his favorite gospel artist,” Jermaine recalls.
According to Jermaine, Rushawn’s teacher recorded him singing “Thank You for Sunshine” in class, and that clip gave the song it’s second birth: on timelines.
In 2017, the video took off around Jamaica. The kind of viral that spreads parent-to-parent and cousin-to-cousin — joyous, unforced, intimate. A child’s voice carrying adult gratitude.
Then, like many internet artifacts, it refused to die.
“It got new life,” Jermaine says.
Later, during the COVID years and after, “Thank You for Sunshine” returned again — this time not only as a shared video, but as a remixable culture object.
“That’s what made it become viral,” he says. “Everybody was remixing the song. It came like a remix challenge.”
He describes a rush of producers and mixers — not just in Jamaica but internationally — putting spins on the track, turning it into something that could live inside dance mixes and TikTok edits, inside global pop timelines, far outside the gospel market.
At one point, Jermaine says, it became “like fourth most brand in the whole entire world” — a slightly tangled phrase that nonetheless communicates the scale: the song had escaped its birthplace.
“It was so difficult to control because it was so worldwide,” Jermaine says. “My lawyers and who I am could not control the amount of [people] making money from the song.”
Why Jermaine Turned to Sony
When a song becomes everyone’s soundtrack, the original artist sometimes becomes the last person able to manage it.
Jermaine decided he needed structure — a roof over the song’s growing universe. That’s when he entered a deal with Sony Publishing, which he describes as primarily a distribution arrangement.
Sony doesn’t own the song, he clarifies quickly. “I still own the masters and own everything. It’s just that we have a distribution deal with them.”
Enter Akon: “He Had to Clear It With Me”
It was after all of this success that Akon recorded a version of the track, singing the chorus and sending “Thank You for Sunshine” into a fresh round of international attention.
“Akon had to clear it with me,” he says.
His team and Akon’s team reached an agreement. Paperwork. Contracts. Terms.
Jermaine describes it not as a “sample” in the traditional sense, but closer to interpolation — Akon reproducing the chorus with his own voice, not lifting Jermaine’s recorded vocals.
“He got the right to sing the chorus of the song,” Jermaine says.
The requirement for credit remained strict: Jermaine’s name in writing credits and metadata — on YouTube, inside the song’s information, across digital platforms.
“If you even look on YouTube, you realize in the writer’s credit you see my name,” he says.
That’s why the “million dollars” claim lands as so corrosive. It rearranges the public’s mental map, placing Rushawn — the classroom child — as the rightful recipient of the big payoff, implying he is the song’s origin.
And by extension, it nudges Jermaine out of his own story.
Last year Edwards charted two songs in the Top 20 on YouTube Jamaica. Fight an Fire In My Heart as the island turned to praise music in the aftermath if Hurricane Melissa.
