Spotify Settles Sosa Entertainment Billion-Dollar Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
The lawsuit kicked off in November of 2019 when Pro Music Rights (PMR) and Sosa Entertainment accused the Stockholm-headquartered streaming service of failing to pay royalties on some 550 million streams – which would be worth at least $1.65 million (calculated using the low end of Spotify’s reported per-stream royalty rate, which is roughly one-third of a penny to one-half of a penny).
At the high end, the figure would total $2.75 million, though damages, in this case, went far beyond non-payments. At the time of the lawsuit’s filing, PMR disclosed that it was seeking more than $1 billion in copyright infringement penalties.
Spotify denied the allegations and fired back with a multifaceted countersuit, accusing PMR, Sosa, and their founder, Jake Noch, of executing “a multi-year campaign of fraud and harassment.” Additionally, the music and podcasting platform alleged that Noch had organized a system to “artificially generate hundreds of millions of fraudulent streams on songs he had seeded.”