{"id":9080,"date":"2025-12-17T06:11:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T06:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ascap-faces-123m-lawsuit-over-stock-music-on-news-sports-radio\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T06:11:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T06:11:15","slug":"ascap-faces-123m-lawsuit-over-stock-music-on-news-sports-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ascap-faces-123m-lawsuit-over-stock-music-on-news-sports-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"ASCAP Faces $123M Lawsuit Over Stock Music On News & Sports Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tASCAP is facing a lawsuit claiming it \u201cseverely underpays\u201d for so-called production music used by talk and sports radio stations, wrongfully withholding more than $120 million in royalties from their rightful owners.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case claims ASCAP\u2019s policies pay out royalties for only a fraction of the actual performances of such songs (also known as stock or library music), which often play on news, talk or sports radio programs as background music or during segment transitions.<\/p>\n

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\n\tFiled by Alibi Music and several other production music publishers, the lawsuit claims ASCAP is wrongfully diverting more than $15 million per year, totaling more than \u201c$123 million in misallocated royalties\u201d over eight years \u2014 a hit that\u2019s been \u201cfinancially devastating\u201d for publishers and composers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cASCAP intentionally deprives [production] music owners and publishers of valuable performance royalties,\u201d writes veteran music attorney Richard Busch<\/strong>, who represents the publishers, in a lawsuit obtained by Billboard<\/em>. \u201cPlaintiffs are forced to bring this action to rectify and obtain fair and just compensation for ASCAP\u2019s blatant abuse of discretion and breach of its contracts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a response statement to Billboard<\/em>, ASCAP said: \u201cThese allegations are baseless. ASCAP operates on a not-for-profit basis and ASCAP follows its publicly available distribution policies, which are fair, transparent and set by its member-elected Board of Directors.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tASCAP is one of the country\u2019s primary performance rights organizations (PROs), which collect performance royalties for American musical compositions. Bars, stadiums, retail stores, radio stations and many others pay ASCAP and other PROs for the right to publicly perform huge catalogs of music to the public.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to the new lawsuit, when it comes to radio plays, ASCAP has imposed \u201cunfair, discriminatory and abusive treatment\u201d on \u201cnon-feature\u201d production music, leaving it a second-class citizen to more traditional \u201cfeature music\u201d by credited musicians.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe problem is two-fold, according to the lawsuit. For one, ASCAP allegedly uses an unfair \u201cweighting formula\u201d that skews radio payments away from production music. It also allegedly uses \u201cwholly inadequate methods and technology\u201d to detect such plays, meaning only a small percentage of such spins are even counted in the first place.<\/p>\n

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

\n\tThe lawsuit cites 1010 WINS, a large New York City AM news radio station. In 2021, the station allegedly played 41,597 individual performances of the production music, which ASCAP \u201cpaid on exactly zero of.\u201d Ditto, allegedly, for Los Angeles news station KNX, which allegedly performed 27,480 production songs without ASCAP paying out for any of them.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cASCAP\u2019s arbitrary, capricious and intentional failure to use readily available technology to obtain a fair count of non-feature music on domestic radio has unfairly diverted millions of dollars annually from non-feature music writers and independent publishers who rely on this income,\u201d the lawsuit reads.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to Alibi Music, the case was also filed by Capp Records, Cushman Entertainment Ltd., Epic Music LA, Terese Hanses, Lab Hits LLC, Manhattan Production Music, Rock Talk Inc., Slipstream ICPO LLC, Songs To Your Eyes, and The Brian Nimens Corp. Ltd. Only ASCAP<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
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ASCAP is facing a lawsuit claiming it \u201cseverely underpays\u201d for so-called production music used by talk and sports radio stations, wrongfully withholding more than $120 million in royalties […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7155,7154,458,303,593,310,6131,1714,608],"class_list":["post-9080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-123m","tag-ascap","tag-faces","tag-lawsuit","tag-music","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-sports","tag-stock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080","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=9080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}