Spotify removes content of some comedians over royalty dispute
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San Francisco: Due to royalties dispute, music streaming giant Spotify has removed the content of some of the popular comedians, including Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, John Mulaney and Jim Gaffigan, media reports say.
Several high-profile entertainers are pursuing royalty payments for their jokes when they're played on the radio, as well as on services like Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and SiriusXM, The Verge reported.
The comics' efforts are backed by global rights administration company, Spoken Giants, which works to ensure that entertainers are properly compensated for spoken-word content.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, comedians are typically paid by their label or distributor -- along with digital performance rights organisation SoundExchange -- when a digital service plays their content.
However, they are technically not compensated for writing that content, something that Spoken Giants hopes to change.
After failed negotiations with Spoken Giants, Spotify removed hundreds of comedians' content from the service.
In a statement to the WSJ, Spotify said that it already paid "significant amounts of money for the content in question, and would love to continue to do so."