Spotify is Hit With a 1.6 Billion Lawsuit from Wixen Music Publishing Inc

Classic songs from Weezer, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Doors have been getting spins on Spotify without proper licensing from their publisher.

In a lawsuit recently filed in California Federal Court Wixen claims that Spotify has been using their music with proper paperwork.

The 2018 lawsuit follows another one from last year where Spotify paid $43 million dollars for failing to pay royalties on some of the songs they used on their platform.

The difference between Spotify and Facebook is that Facebook has created a platform where people give away their content for free to help get Facebook richer, where as in the case with Spotify, the musicians and publishing companies are taking control of their intellectual property.

In a perfect world people would give up on these platforms and create their own outlets such as Neil Young’s streaming music service.

Why spend the time putting effort in on a piece of creative work and than give it away for free in exchange for a larger audience fueled by robots? Does seeing a fictional number appear still provide any real growth for a company? Facebook has admitted that over 270 million of the accounts worldwide are fake.

Content producers will continue to fight back for their own rights.

Watch over a YouTube clip from CNET on this subject.