Ministry of Sound sues Spotify over compilation albums

Dance music brand Ministry of Sound (MoS) has sued Spotify for infringing its rights covering compilation albums.

The suit, filed at the England & Wales High Court on Monday, calls for an injunction forcing the music streaming service to delete any allegedly infringing playlists created by users.

MoS compiles albums using songs from mainly electronic music artists, with well-known brands including ‘Hed Kandi’ and ‘Ibiza Annual’ as well as those using the name ‘Ministry of Sound’.

The label claims that since 2012 it has asked Spotify to remove playlists that apparently copy its albums, but Spotify has refused.

Chief executive of MoS, Lohan Presencer, told the Guardian newspaper that “what we do is a lot more than putting playlists together: a lot of research goes into creating our compilation albums, and the intellectual property involved in that. It's not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them”.

Spotify said it could not comment on pending litigation, but that “every single time a track is played on Spotify, rights holders are paid – and every track played on Spotify is played under a full licence from the owners of that track”.

The streaming service provides access to about 20 million songs, and by the end of this year expects to have paid rights owners about $1billion in total since launching in 2008.

Since then, Spotify’s 24 million users are believed to have compiled more than one billion playlists. Users can also browse the platform for others’ playlists.

MoS doesn’t have the right to stream its compilations on Spotify, as most of the songs on the lists have been licensed from other record labels and Spotify only remunerates for content ownership.

The dance label is believed to be filing suit under section 3(a) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) 1988, which provides copyright protection for databases, described as a “collection of independent works”.

In one ruling ( Football Dataco v Sportradar) earlier this year, which dealt with fixture lists for football matches, the UK Court of Appeal found that the unauthorised re-use of a substantial part of a database that has been heavily invested in can be an infringement of the owner's sui generis database right.

Akash Sachdeva, partner at Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP, said if MoS has filed under section 3(a) of the CDPA, the claims “might be a bit of a stretch”.

“This is not a particularly sensible claim – it’s not a clear cut case. But I can understand that they have put a lot of effort into arranging these tracks.

“Strictly speaking, they would have to do the claim on a playlist by playlist basis. Each one would have to result from the author’s creation, though they may be able to get some evidence about how playlists are created more generally.”

He added: “There all sorts of other issues not touched upon, such as Spotify is not making the playlists – it’s the users – and even if there is infringement, how many songs out of 10 do there need to be in a playlist for there to be infringement?

“It’s hard to judge,” he said.

The suit shines more light on the relationship between platforms delivering content digitally and music labels’ business models, which have been traditionally geared towards selling records and CDs but have sometimes struggled to adapt to the online era.

“Companies that get to grips with new technology are the ones who are going to thrive in the future,” Sachdeva said.