MLC

How we got here is complicated. Separate from the effort to improve how much songwriters are paid from streaming is the challenge of even receiving the money at all. It’s been well known that streaming services were stockpiling unpaid royalties, and over the years that money continued to accrue with little recourse other than costly lawsuits that didn’t solve the underlying problem and threatened the growth we needed in a post Napster world. For over a decade experts have estimated, debated and debunked theories about how much was being held. Spotify, Apple, Amazon and others have long said they employed exhaustive searches for copyright owners. There have been congressional oversight hearings, studies done by the U.S. Copyright Office and industry experts, however the magni...