A guide to American music copyright laws, which have enabled Wixen Publishing to sue Spotify for $1.6B and which have failed to respond to technological change
The hidden costs of streaming music — Spotify is finally gearing up to go public, and the company's February 28th filing … Tweets: @robertblevine_ , @evacide , and @reckless See also Mediagazer Tweets: Robert Levine / @robertblevine_ : “There isn't one copyright in one song — it's four or five or six or really, a potentially unknowable number of rights scattered across the whole work.” Wait, WHAT?!? http://www.theverge.com/... Potentially unknowable? How? Eva / @evacide : What's a mechanical license and what does that have to do with Wixen v. Spotify? @sarahjeong explains, with helpful charts and graphics to get you through this copyright geekery. http://www.theverge.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : This @sarahjeong dive into the $1.6b Spotify lawsuit should drive you bonkers. It's a lawsuit about literal paperwork! http://www.theverge.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This explainer arrives at a charged moment: Spotify filed its February 28th paperwork to go public while facing Wixen Music's $1.6B lawsuit claiming up to 21% of its catalog is unlicensed. The piece unpacks why that claim is even possible — a single song carries not one copyright but 'four or five or six or really, a potentially unknowable number' of scattered rights, so streaming services must clear reproduction (mechanical) rights separately from recording rights.
It is also the third act of a longer fight: Spotify was first sued over mechanical royalties back in 2015 (the original songwriter suit), settled with songwriters in 2017, then turned around and challenged whether those rights apply to its business at all. The Verge's argument is that the lawsuits are symptoms — American copyright law simply never adapted to streaming-scale digital reproduction.
First-order effects
- Spotify enters its IPO window carrying an unresolved $1.6B liability, forcing it to either settle with publishers like Wixen or defend the applicability of mechanical licenses to streaming in court.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers now have a template: sue at the moment of maximum leverage (an IPO filing), as Wixen did, rather than wait for statutory royalty processes to catch up.
- Labels read these publisher wins as leverage over platforms — Warner's later India lawsuit against Spotify shows rights holders using litigation to resist services cutting more direct deals with artists.
Third-order effects
- If every platform must litigate or renegotiate rights work-by-work because the law lags the technology, music licensing consolidates around whoever can afford the legal apparatus — pushing the industry toward bespoke direct deals instead of statutory licenses, a pattern that later extends beyond streaming to archives, as when UMG, Sony, and other labels sued the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project.
The trend: US music copyright is being renegotiated lawsuit-by-lawsuit because statutory mechanical licensing never caught up with streaming, making litigation the de facto mechanism for setting platform-publisher terms.