As far as I understand, the crux of MOS's argument revolves around the fact that they haven't signed up to Spotify. In order to create their compilation albums, MOS need to license tunes from other record labels, as they don't have enough high profile music in-house to fill it up with. By having their tracklistings copied on Spotify, MOS lose out on the royalties they would get from these songs had they been bought from this album via iTunes, or from the sales of the album as a whole. Sub-licensing from other labels is a complete legal minefield, which is why MOS's compilations don't appear on Spotify.

You're right, I completely misread the article. I still struggle to sympathise with them, arranging tracks in an order is hardly doing a proper mix of them and they're clearly just doing it for attention.

As far as I understand, the crux of MOS's argument revolves around the fact that they haven't signed up to Spotify. In order to create their compilation albums, MOS need to license tunes from other record labels, as they don't have enough high profile music in-house to fill it up with. By having their tracklistings copied on Spotify, MOS lose out on the royalties they would get from these songs had they been bought from this album via iTunes, or from the sales of the album as a whole. Sub-licensing from other labels is a complete legal minefield, which is why MOS's compilations don't appear on Spotify.

 

If MOS name/trademark is splashed over playlists then the public are likely to think that MOS had licenced Spotify to use MOS material when MOS have not done so so I think if something is available on Spotify that is likely to confuse the public into thinking it is sanctioned by MOS then I think Spotify should pay MOS royalties

 

Will be interesting to see the end result of this case

The uniqueness of a mixed compilation released by MOS is not replicated by a Spotify play list.

 

Any "work" that is done by MOS is completely contained in the transitions between the tracks which is 100% absent in a Spotify playlist.

Ministry of Sound (or MISERY of Sound as it's known in the industry) represents the very lowest denominator of 'dance fan' - the 'dance fan' who votes for Guetta as 'DJ of the Year', who buys the endless trashy MoS compilation albums to blast out of his open windows and the 'dance fan' whose main contribution to the scene is one visit to Ibiza in 2010 and a weekend trip to Creamfields last summer. It's absolutely commercial shit. Also, they seem to be under the misconception that only heterosexual males every buy dance music - when was the last time you saw a male, scantily clad or othwerwise, on a MoS compilation CD cover? Exactly...you haven't. They exclusively use slutty semi-clad busty maidens for their artwork. Cheap and very very nasty.

CEO Lohan Presencer seems to think that they have a good chance of winning their case against Spotify.

 

"We built our business over the last 20 years on the basis of curating music," Presencer said.

 

"We employ a huge team of people who are specialists in their areas of music, on different genres of music - and monitoring what's going and what might be popular.

 

"We painstakingly compile, order and then release and market these compilation albums, and have done for 20 years. We release about 50 albums a year, we've sold 50 million albums in our history and we believe there's intellectual property [iP]generated in what we've done and what we do.

 

"That property has the right to be protected in exactly the same way as the copyright of the individual tracks themselves."

 

"We wouldn't have launched a legal action unless we were confident. We received solid legal advice that said there was IP generated there.

 

"There are legal precedents that clearly demonstrate that there is copyright in a database right. There are plenty of European law case histories that demonstrate that that's the case.

 

"We're not interested in pursuing individual users - that's not what this is about. Of course people are going to use a service that enables them to put together playlists. All we're thinking is for Spotify to take those Ministry ones down.

 

"We're saying that these are exact copies of the intellectual property we have generated and once we've drawn your attention to it - particularly in circumstances where some of those playlists have got our name and brand attached to them - we'd like you to take them down."

 

Full interview at Digital Spy.

Edited September 10, 201311 yr by Oliver