Spotify is not liable to pay vast unpaid royalties—some $40 million—owed to Eminem’s publisher, despite failing to secure the proper license for hosting his songs, a federal judge in Tennessee has ruled. Concluding a high-profile copyright infringement case that could have gone to the Supreme Court, the judge accepted Spotify’s claim that royalty collector Kobalt Music Group, not the streaming service, would have been responsible for paying any royalties that the court had deemed to be outstanding.
The judge suggested that Eight Mile Style LLC, the publisher that brought the lawsuit in 2019, had kept quiet about the licensing rights in a “strategic” attempt to extract a copyright infringement payout from Spotify, rather than resolving the issue when discrepancies became apparent.
“While Spotify’s handling of composer copyrights appears to have been seriously flawed, any right to recover damages based on those flaws belongs to those innocent rights holders who were genuinely harmed,” Judge Aleta A. Trauger wrote in her opinion, “not ones who, like Eight Mile Style, had every opportunity to set things right and simply chose not to do so for no apparent reason, other than that being the victim of infringement pays better than being an ordinary licensor.”
The judge’s opinion, posted on August 15, noted that Bridgeport Music, a company affiliated to Eight Mile Style, had received the relevant license in 2009—meaning that, despite Kobalt’s responsibility to collect the royalties, the agency had no legal right to license the songs in the United States and Canada.
When reached by Pitchfork, representatives for Eminem, who was not formally a party to the case, offered no comment. Pitchfork has also emailed attorneys and representatives for Spotify and attorneys for Eight Mile Style LLC and Kobalt Music Group for comment.
