{"id":7767,"date":"2025-09-10T22:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/judge-cuts-napster-settlement-that-paid-songwriters-30x-less-lawyers\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T22:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:26:09","slug":"judge-cuts-napster-settlement-that-paid-songwriters-30x-less-lawyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/judge-cuts-napster-settlement-that-paid-songwriters-30x-less-lawyers\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Cuts Napster Settlement That Paid Songwriters 30x Less\u00a0Lawyers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tT<\/span>wo years after an appeals court overturned a \u201cmeasly\u201d class action settlement for songwriters that netted their lawyers a huge payout, a judge has now awarded those attorneys just a tiny fraction of their original fee.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe scathing 2023 ruling rejected a deal struck with Napster that secured just $53,000 for songwriters but paid their lawyers a whopping $1.7 million. The appeals court said it was very clearly \u201cunreasonable\u201d to pay attorneys more than 30 times the amount they actually won for their clients.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Wednesday, a lower court judge heeded that warning and sharply reduced the amount paid to those lawyers under the settlement \u2014 all the way down to $86,022.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe difference between the settlement value \u2026 and the [legal fees] figure \u2026 is staggering,\u201d Judge Jeffrey S. White<\/strong> wrote in the ruling, obtained by Billboard<\/em>. \u201cThe court therefore finds it appropriate to substantially reduce the [legal fees] figure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ruling came in a class action filed in 2016 against Rhapsody, which has since rebranded as Napster. It was one of several such copyright cases filed in the mid-2010s over the failure of streaming services like Spotify to properly pay mechanical royalties to songwriters.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the lawsuit \u2014 and its prospects for a large payout \u2014 were sharply reduced by a competing class action organized by the National Music Publishers\u2019 Association, which eventually drained roughly 98% of the possible class members. The passage of the Music Modernization Act, which largely fixed the problems that led to the litigation, further reduced the scope of the case.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Napster finally settled in 2019, it agreed to pay as much as $20 million. But because NMPA\u2019s competing lawsuit had decimated the earlier case, Napster ended up paying only $52,841 to the actual songwriters who chose to participate. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it came time to figure out how much to pay the lawyers who represented the songwriters, their fees were calculated as a percentage of that hypothetical $20 million cap, not the actual payout \u2014 resulting in the outsized $1.7 million award.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThat outcome shocked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in 2023 that the \u201cmeager\u201d payout to songwriters didn\u2019t come close to warranting the massive reward to their attorneys: \u201cThis case will likely make the average person shake her head in disbelief,\u201d U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee<\/strong> wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tBack at the trial court, the plaintiff\u2019s lawyers (from the law firm Michelman & Robinson LLP) once again asked for a big award, offering a revised request of $1.2 million. Even if the direct monetary payout was small, they argued their lawsuit had provided \u201csignificant benefits\u201d to songwriters, including aiding the larger NMPA case and even helping the passage of the MMA. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut in Wednesday\u2019s decision, Judge White said he was required to award the lawyers no more than 25 percent of the total benefit they had won for their clients. Under a revised calculation, the judge put that figure at $358,903 \u2014 meaning he would award just $86,022 to the attorneys. That figure will be supplemented by an award of legal \u201ccosts\u201d (separate from attorney\u2019s fees) of just over $13,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne silver lining for the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys? The judge also rejected arguments from Napster\u2019s attorney, who had urged him to award the attorneys no more than 25 percent of the original $52,841 \u2014 meaning just $13,210 in legal fees.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys at issue in the ruling did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two years after an appeals court overturned a \u201cmeasly\u201d class action settlement for songwriters that netted their lawyers a huge payout, a judge has now awarded those attorneys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6763,5638,423,6764,6595,5598,399,6528],"class_list":["post-7767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-30x","tag-cuts","tag-judge","tag-lesslawyers","tag-napster","tag-paid","tag-settlement","tag-songwriters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7767","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=7767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}