Spotify to pay out $112m in royalties to songwriters after settlement

Spotify will pay out $112m in a settlement agreement, following two lawsuits that claimed songwriters hadn’t been paid enough in royalties for their work being streamed on the service.

The class action, a combination of the two lawsuits, originally came from David Lowery, an musicians’ rights advocate from the band Camper Van Beethoven, and Melissa Ferrick, a songwriter and owner of a music publishing company. They each asserted that Spotify had failed to obtain proper licences to songwriters’ work; Ferrick accused them of “wholesale copyright infringement”.

It’s also a win for Spotify, which was pushing for the judge to approve the settlement, previously agreed upon in May 2017. The agreement has met with dissent from music publishing company Wixen, which collects royalties for artists including Janis Joplin and Neil Young. The company filed its own $1.6bn lawsuit in January, arguing for damages of $150,000 per song for more than 10,000 songs; it described the settlement decision as “a 98.7% discount for non-wilful infringement” and “a practical free pass on wilful infringement”. Wixen added that the settlement “offers [songwriters] an unfair dollar amount in light of Spotify’s ongoing, wilful copyright infringement of their works”.