This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, explains why Spotify deleted a swathe of comedy albums from its service over the Thanksgiving weekend – and why it might be at the mercy of big-money lawsuits in the weeks and months ahead.
Ingham explains that two prominent companies now operating in the world of comedy royalty collection and administration – Word Collections and Spoken Giants – are each respectively run by two music industry veterans who are experts in the intricacies of licensing in the US: Jeff Price (Word Collections), the founder of Audiam and TuneCore; and Jim King (Spoken Giants), a former senior figure at US collection society BMI.
Spotify has suddenly removed comedy albums by stand-ups ranging from Kevin Hart to Tiffany Haddish, Jim Segura and Robin Williams – as Jim King accuses the streaming company of knowing “they don’t have all the rights in place to serve this content”.
That’s a reference to the rights to the underlying lyrical content of each piece of performed stand-up. Spotify has the licenses to the recordings, but possibly not this underlying right – the equivalent of the publishing right in music.
