Radio Stations & Irving Azoff’s PRO Finalize Deal to End Long Antitrust Battle
After more than five years of litigation, a bruising fight over "illegal cartels" and "exorbitant prices" is finally over.
The Radio Music Licensing Committee and Irving Azoff’s performance rights organization Global Music Rights announced Monday that they’d finalized an agreement to resolve more than five years of contentious antitrust litigation.
The completion of the settlement, announced last month, had been contingent on a sufficient number of RMLC’s 10,000 member radio stations signing off on the agreement – a condition that both sides say has now been satisfied.
“This settlement puts an end to more than five years of litigation and represents a shared desire by both sides to find a way for radio stations and GMR to work together on a long-term basis without repeatedly resorting to litigation,” said RMLC chairman Ed Atsinger III said in a joint statement.
“Global Music Rights stands for songwriters and the value of their music,” Azoff said in the same joint statement. “I am proud of the GMR team for the hard work on behalf of songwriters in achieving this settlement.”
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The deal, which paves the way for long-term licensing agreements that start in April, will resolve more than five years of testy litigation over the power exerted by each side in negotiations over how much radio stations must pay to songwriters.
RMLC represents thousands of radio stations in negotiations with performance rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI, which provide blanket licenses covering hundreds of thousands of songs. Founded by Azoff in 2013, GMR is an upstart competitor to those major PROs, but one that sports a star-studded repertoire including Bruce Springsteen, Drake and Bruno Mars.
In 2016, the two groups filed dueling lawsuits, each accusing the other of violating federal antitrust laws by illegally coordinating the actions of their members to win unfair leverage in such licensing negotiations.
In its lawsuit, RMLC claimed that GMR had lured mega-stars away from heavily-regulated groups like ASCAP and BMI and illegally packaged them together to create an unfair “must-have” collection – allowing them to extract “exorbitant prices” from radio stations.
GMR quickly fired back with a suit of its own, calling RMLC an “illegal cartel” that had long abused its overwhelming market dominance to “artificially depress” the licensing rates paid by its member radio stations.
The exact licensing terms of the settlement finalized Monday were not made public. It’s also unclear what percentage of radio stations were required to sign off on the deal before it was finalized.