A royalties disagreement has led to the removal of popular comedians’ content from Spotify
Comedians including Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish and John Mulaney have been removed from Spotify because of a dispute about royalties. Entertainers, including some of the biggest names in the business, have been demanding royalty payments from radio stations and other platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and SiriusXM for the use of their jokes.
Spoken Giants, a global rights management business, is supporting the comics’ efforts to ensure that spoken-word content is fairly compensated. According to the Wall Street Journal, when their content is played on a digital service, comedians are often compensated by their label or distributor as well as the digital performance rights group SoundExchange. However, Spoken Giants aims to change that by allowing writers to be compensated for their work.
Spotify deleted hundreds of comedians’ content from the service after failing to reach an agreement with Spoken Giants. If you’ve previously paid “significant amounts of money for the content in question, and would like to continue doing so,” Spotify says that it would like to continue doing just that. The Verge requested a statement from Spotify, but received no response right away.
No word on whether Spotify and Spoken Giants will try to strike an arrangement again, or if the comedians’ content will ever be available again. There are a lot of people who could be missing out on a lot of exposure because Spotify is predicted to have 400 million subscribers by year’s end.