ASCAP Faces $123M Lawsuit Over Stock Music On News & Sports Radio: ‘Financially Devastating’

ASCAP is facing a lawsuit claiming it “severely underpays” for so-called production music used by talk and sports radio stations, wrongfully withholding more than $120 million in royalties from their rightful owners.

The case claims ASCAP’s policies pay out royalties for only a fraction of the actual performances of such songs (also known as stock or library music), which often play on news, talk or sports radio programs as background music or during segment transitions.

Filed by Alibi Music and several other production music publishers, the lawsuit claims ASCAP is wrongfully diverting more than $15 million per year, totaling more than “$123 million in misallocated royalties” over eight years — a hit that’s been “financially devastating” for publishers and composers.

“ASCAP intentionally deprives [production] music owners and publishers of valuable performance royalties,” writes veteran music attorney Richard Busch, who represents the publishers, in a lawsuit obtained by Billboard. “Plaintiffs are forced to bring this action to rectify and obtain fair and just compensation for ASCAP’s blatant abuse of discretion and breach of its contracts.”

In a response statement to Billboard, ASCAP said: “These allegations are baseless. ASCAP operates on a not-for-profit basis and ASCAP follows its publicly available distribution policies, which are fair, transparent and set by its member-elected Board of Directors.”

ASCAP is one of the country’s primary performance rights organizations (PROs), which collect performance royalties for American musical compositions. Bars, stadiums, retail stores, radio stations and many others pay ASCAP and other PROs for the right to publicly perform huge catalogs of music to the public.

According to the new lawsuit, when it comes to radio plays, ASCAP has imposed “unfair, discriminatory and abusive treatment” on “non-feature” production music, leaving it a second-class citizen to more traditional “feature music” by credited musicians.

The problem is two-fold, according to the lawsuit. For one, ASCAP allegedly uses an unfair “weighting formula” that skews radio payments away from production music. It also allegedly uses “wholly inadequate methods and technology” to detect such plays, meaning only a small percentage of such spins are even counted in the first place.

The lawsuit cites 1010 WINS, a large New York City AM news radio station. In 2021, the station allegedly played 41,597 individual performances of the production music, which ASCAP “paid on exactly zero of.” Ditto, allegedly, for Los Angeles news station KNX, which allegedly performed 27,480 production songs without ASCAP paying out for any of them.

“ASCAP’s arbitrary, capricious and intentional failure to use readily available technology to obtain a fair count of non-feature music on domestic radio has unfairly diverted millions of dollars annually from non-feature music writers and independent publishers who rely on this income,” the lawsuit reads.

In addition to Alibi Music, the case was also filed by Capp Records, Cushman Entertainment Ltd., Epic Music LA, Terese Hanses, Lab Hits LLC, Manhattan Production Music, Rock Talk Inc., Slipstream ICPO LLC, Songs To Your Eyes, and The Brian Nimens Corp. Ltd. Only ASCAP