Judge sends MLC-Pandora royalty dispute to jury trial
A federal judge in Nashville has refused to decide a royalties dispute between the Mechanical Licensing Collective and Pandora on paper, sending the contested issues to a jury.
Judge Eli Richardson turned down requests from both sides for summary judgment, a decision made without a trial, in an order dated 30 September, according to Billboard. No trial date is currently scheduled.
The case centres on money for songs. The Collective, known as the MLC, was created under the Music Modernization Act to collect and divide mechanical royalties, the payments owed to songwriters and music publishers when their work is streamed or reproduced.
The MLC sued Pandora in 2024. It accused the company of labelling its free tier as non-interactive to avoid the higher rates paid by interactive platforms such as Spotify.
The distinction controls the pay. Interactive services let listeners choose specific songs on demand, as Spotify and Apple Music do. Non-interactive services work more like radio, with the platform choosing what plays next. The two categories pay different songwriter and publisher royalty rates.
Pandora already pays at the interactive rate for its premium on-demand tier. It treats Pandora Free as a non-interactive service. The MLC says that classification is wrong.
The lawsuit brings a single count seeking unpaid royalties and late fees under the blanket statutory permission that lets streaming services use songs without negotiating track by track, according to IPWatchdog. In practice, that means the jury will be asked to decide how Pandora Free actually behaves and which rate should have applied.
The paperwork alone was huge. The two sides filed a combined 263 documents totalling more than 7,000 pages in support of their bids for an early ruling.
That volume points to how much is disputed. The judge left those contested facts for jurors rather than deciding them himself.
In a separate dispute, Pandora settled a streaming-royalties case brought by comedians, including the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin, Reuters reported in February. That case concerned spoken-word recordings rather than songs.
For fans, this means nothing changes yet. Pandora Free continues as before while the song royalty case waits for a trial date, and any additional money for writers and publishers will depend on what the jury decides.
