Spotify Settles David Lowery Mechanical Royalties Lawsuit

In 2015, Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery brought a $150 million class action lawsuit against Spotify for allegedly “distributing copyrighted material without securing the necessary mechanical licenses.” The mechanical royalty is the royalty paid to a songwriter whenever a copy of one of their songs is made. Now, Spotify has reached a settlement with Lowery and other songwriters bringing similar suits against it, as Billboard reports. The Swedish streaming service will establish a fund “worth $43.4 million to compensate songwriters and publishers whose compositions the service used without paying mechanical royalties,” and also continue working on improving their data collection system “to help ensure [appropriate] owners are paid their royalties in the future.”

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