Spotify has posted its first ever year of continuous profits, but it’s also facing a major takedown initiative. The National Music Publishers’ Association announced that it will begin an ongoing project to take down podcast episodes on Spotify that use the music of NMPA members without permission.
The initiative will begin with notices to Spotify that the episodes featuring the music have to be taken down, and NMPA says that they have already identified 2,500 such infractions.
The move comes after the NMPA filed a lawsuit over Spotify’s audiobook bundling deal, which gives subscribers 15 hours of free audiobook listening to select titles each month. Spotify defeated a lawsuit from Mechanical Licensing Collective over the deal last week.
“This is a weak reaction to the judge dismissing the MLC’s lawsuit. Last summer, the NMPA claimed that there were unlicensed works in podcasts on Spotify. The fact that the NMPA waited months, despite multiple written requests by Spotify for details, which they never bothered to answer, to report these episodes only further emphasizes that this is a press stunt. Platforms like Spotify, which are home to millions of pieces of UGC content, regularly receive takedown requests, and, as always, we will act promptly and, where appropriate, remove the episodes in question,” Spotify’s reps said in a statement.
NMPA President & CEO David Israelite said, “Spotify has thousands of unlicensed songs in its podcasts, which it has done nothing to remedy. This takedown action comes as no surprise, we have warned of this issue for some time.”
“Podcasts are a growing source of revenue for songwriters and publishers, and it is essential that podcasts provide lawfully produced entertainment,” he added. “This is not hard to do, and Spotify knows, and has known, how to fix this problem for their users. We hope podcast hosts will stand up for their fellow creators and demand that Spotify do better.”
