This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Spotify faces a lawsuit over allegations that it “unlawfully” chose to reduce royalty payments to publishers and songwriters; Earth, Wind & Fire reaches a settlement over how much it’s owed in damages by an unauthorized tribute band; Elvis Presley’s granddaughter sues to protect Graceland from a “fraudulent” foreclosure; and much more. Weeks after Billboard estimated that Spotify would pay roughly $150 million less to songwriters and publishers over the next year, the streaming giant is facing a legal battle over the move.
In a lawsuit filed last week, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) claimed Spotify had “unilaterally and unlawfully” chosen to cut its royalty payments nearly in half by “erroneously recharacterizing” the nature of its streaming services to secure a lower rate. “The financial consequences of Spotify’s failure to meet its statutory obligations are enormous for songwriters and music publishers,” the MLC wrote. “If unchecked, the impact on songwriters and music publishers of Spotify’s unlawful underreporting could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
” At issue in the lawsuit is Spotify’s recent addition of audiobooks to its premium subscription service. The streamer believes that because of the new offering, it’s now .
