The last couple of years has seen a number of lawsuits being filed in the music industry about one obscure part of copyright law, are performers supposed to be paid royalties if their songs are used on digital radio.
On Friday, SiriusXM settled one of these lawsuits when it said that it will pay $ 210 million to major record companies for broadcasting songs that were created prior to 1972.
This settlement is going to open the door for older performers to collect millions of dollars in royalties who haven’t been paid for satellite radio and the internet. This comes days after Apple changed its plan to not pay any royalties while trying out its new music playing service.
Cary Sherman, the CEO of RIAA, who has been coordinating the suit for Sony, Warner, Universal & Abkco said that this was a great step forward for music creators. He said that music should be valued equally irrespective of whether it was created in 1970 or in 2015.
The suit has been followed intensely by the entire music industry. Federal copyright protection something which has applied to songwriting rights for a while now was only extended to recordings in 1972. This is why quite a few digital radio services like Pandora and Sirius haven’t paid any recording royalties when playing older songs. It was a couple of years ago when the 60’s band Turtles sued Sirius in 3 federal courts saying that even their songs prior to 1972 were still covered by state laws in Florida, California and New York. They also accused SiriusXM of broadcasting the songs without the proper permissions and demanded $ 100 million as damages. Major labels very soon followed and filed a suit in a California court.
Sirius revealed on Friday that it had reached a settlement with labels on the 17th of June which would allow them to play songs all the way till 2017. They said that they would negotiate for fresh licenses after that.
There is one question that still remains unanswered though, how are the labels going to distribute the money. Warner claims that it is going to distribute payments using SoundExchange while the other labels have refused to comment.
