Sony, Google, Apple Hit With Lawsuits Over Pre-1972 Music
The lawsuits have the potential of wiping out much older music from the Internet. — All of the leading providers of streaming music are now in the scorching hot legal zone involving pre-1972 music after seven lawsuits were filed …
Context & Ripple Effects
The seven suits filed against Sony, Google and Apple extend a legal pressure campaign that was already visible elsewhere in streaming: months later, Pandora chose to settle with the RIAA via a $90 million payment for playing pre-1972 songs rather than litigate. Pre-1972 recordings sit outside the federal copyright system that governs most streamed music, which is why these claims can be brought directly against the platforms themselves.
The campaign has since widened beyond commercial streamers: in 2023 the major labels pursued UMG and Sony Music's lawsuit against the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project of digitized vintage records — evidence that enforcement now targets any large-scale digital reproduction of older catalogs, not just subscription services.
First-order effects
- Sony, Google and Apple each face direct infringement exposure on their streaming services for recordings that fall outside the federal statutory license, putting their oldest catalog at immediate risk of takedown or renegotiated terms.
- Every other major streaming provider is effectively put on notice that carrying pre-1972 music without a separate deal is a live legal liability, not a settled practice.
Second-order effects
- Pandora's $90 million settlement establishes a de facto price tag for legacy-catalog clearance, giving labels leverage to charge streamers separately for pre-1972 works on top of standard mechanical rates.
- Services that cannot or will not pay face catalog fragmentation — the practical outcome the Hollywood Reporter flags as wiping much older music off the internet — while those that do pay shift cost toward subscription prices.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy recordings become a permanently bifurcated asset class: anything digitized without an explicit label deal — from streamers to projects like the Internet Archive's — is exposed to suit, pushing archival access behind licensing walls.
- Labels' willingness to litigate platforms directly foreshadows the broader posture seen later in Warner Music's lawsuit against Spotify in India — rights holders asserting control wherever music is distributed digitally, including against partners who bypass them.
The trend: Music rights holders are converting pre-1972 recordings from public-domain-adjacent catalog into newly monetizable, enforceable inventory across every corner of the digital internet.