{"id":7243,"date":"2025-08-05T12:49:01","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T12:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/sony-music-hits-napster-with-lawsuit-over-9m-in-unpaid-royalties\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T12:49:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T12:49:01","slug":"sony-music-hits-napster-with-lawsuit-over-9m-in-unpaid-royalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/sony-music-hits-napster-with-lawsuit-over-9m-in-unpaid-royalties\/","title":{"rendered":"Sony Music Hits Napster With Lawsuit Over $9M in Unpaid Royalties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tS<\/span>ony Music has filed a lawsuit against Napster over allegations that the streaming service owes more than $9 million in unpaid royalties \u2014 and has continued to illegally play the songs after Sony pulled the plug on their licensing deal.<\/p>\n

\n\tNapster \u2014 not the infamous turn-of-the-century file-sharing site but the small streaming service once known as Rhapsody \u2014 was acquired in March by Infinite Reality, a digital media and e-commerce company, for $207 million.<\/p>\n

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\n\tBut in a lawsuit filed Friday (Aug. 1) in Manhattan federal court, Sony accused the newly sold company of failing to pay its bills. The case claims Napster owed more than $9.2 million when Sony finally terminated its contract in June \u2014 but has kept on using the songs anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen companies exploit Sony Music\u2019s sound recordings for commercial benefit without authorization, this not only harms Sony Music by depriving it of compensation, but it also reduces the incentive to invest in the creation and dissemination of new music,\u201d the company\u2019s lawyers write.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite Napster\u2019s origins as an industry-shaking pirating service, the famous name has been reused for decades on a series of legal<\/em> music services. Most recently, Rhapsody rebranded under the Napster name in 2016; it had a little more than 1 million monthly active users at the end of 2020, according to Music Ally<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tBack in January, Billboard<\/em> reported that Napster had been making late royalty payments to at least half a dozen distributors and record labels, sometimes by as much as a year. In June, SoundExchange filed another lawsuit<\/a> against Napster over accusations of $3.4 million in unpaid royalties.<\/p>\n

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\n\tAccording to Sony\u2019s new lawsuit on Friday, Napster has failed to pay royalties to the company for over a year. By March, Sony says Napster had racked up an unpaid royalty balance of $6,787,466 across four different licensing deals.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Napster inked the Infinite Reality acquisition deal in March, the terms of Sony\u2019s licensing agreement gave the music giant the right to terminate its licensing agreement with Napster entirely. But the company\u2019s lawyers say Sony waived that right in exchange for a promise by Napster to finally pay the outstanding royalty balance.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to Sony, Napster never did so \u2014 and on June 23, the label terminated the licensing deal, meaning the streaming service no longer had any legal right to play the company\u2019s catalog. But the lawsuit says Napster never actually removed the music from its platform and is now simply committing wholesale copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDespite the termination of all of defendants\u2019 licenses to use any of Sony Music works, defendants have continued to use and exploit SME sound recordings and music videos,\u201d the company\u2019s lawyers wrote. \u201cSony Music has identified a sample of hundreds of sound recordings and music videos that were available through Napster.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"AccuRadio\"<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tFriday\u2019s case is very obviously not the first copyright battle for Napster. Shortly after Shawn Fanning<\/strong> and Sean Parker<\/strong>\u2019s pioneering service took the country by storm in 1999, it was facing infringement lawsuits from various heavy-hitters, including Metallica, Dr. Dre and the RIAA. Those cases were quickly successful: a federal judge issued an injunction in 2001, effectively forcing Napster to shut down.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe following year, Bertelsmann announced that it would acquire the service and turn it into a licensed listening platform, but a bankruptcy judge later blocked the sale. In the years since, the Napster name has been bought by a series of owners: first by Roxio, then by Best Buy, and finally in 2011 by Rhapsody, an early music streaming service, which rebranded itself as Napster in 2016.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit from Sony did not say how much it was seeking in damages. But under U.S. law, copyright owners can seek as much as $150,000 for every work infringed, meaning damages can quickly add up when hundreds or thousands of songs are in dispute.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement to\u00a0Billboard<\/em>\u00a0on Monday (Aug. 4), a spokeswoman for Napster said: \u201cWe have no comment on pending litigation. However, we deeply value our relationships with all of our partners. We remain committed to rebuilding Napster\u2019s relationships with all of the major labels and are hopeful for a swift and amicable resolution.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sony Music has filed a lawsuit against Napster over allegations that the streaming service owes more than $9 million in unpaid royalties \u2014 and has continued to illegally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1887,303,593,6595,1219,1840,1921],"class_list":["post-7243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-hits","tag-lawsuit","tag-music","tag-napster","tag-royalties","tag-sony","tag-unpaid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}