The music industry has long since been at odds with music streaming and it appears that the battle isn’t over yet. Wixen Music Publishing filed court documents late last year suing Spotify, one of the leaders in music streaming, for a whopping $1.6 billion USD. Wixen represents a catalogue of over 50,000 songs by artists such as The Doors, Rage Against the Machine, Tom Petty, Weezer, Neil Young, and more.
“Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” reads the complaint. “Wixen notified Spotify that it had neither obtained a direct or compulsory mechanical license for the use of the Works. For these reasons and the foregoing, Wixen is entitled to the maximum statutory relief.”
In the complaint, Wixen alleges that Spotify is guilty of streaming 10,874 songs they administer without proper licensing or compensation and is seeking $150,000 per song to bring the total award up to $1.6 billion. Wixen states that while Spotify has licensed sound recordings through various music labels, they have not licensed the musical composition (the words and musical notation) through other copyright holders like themselves.
Wixen is also seeking an injunction to “prevent and restrain Spotify’s ongoing copyright infringement” and is asking for a trial by jury, presumably hoping they’ll have an easier time convincing a jury that Spotify is in the wrong in this case. This isn’t the first time the streaming music company has been sued for copyright infringement and it likely won’t be the last as they have dealt with, or are currently dealing with, a number of other lawsuits filed last year.
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