British copyright organisation starts legal action against music streaming service SoundCloud

The British copyright organisation Performing Right Society (PRS) starts legal action against Soundcloud following five years of unsuccessful negotiations. PRS has posted a letter on its website explaining the move.

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PRS represents copyrights of 111,000 componists, text writers and musicians who don't get paid when music is streamed on Soundcloud.

"Launched in 2008, the service [Soundcloud] now has more than 175m unique listeners per month. Unfortunately, the organisation continues to deny it needs a PRS for Music licence for its existing service available in the UK and Europe, meaning it is not remunerating our members when their music is streamed by the SoundCloud platform", PRS writes in the letter.

The copyright organisation is also unhappy with the way Soundcloud removes copyright violating content. PRS sent Soundcloud a list of 4500 copyright infringing tracks of which Soundcloud removed only removed 250. PRS therefore doesn't see any other way than starting legal actions against the music streaming service.

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Soundcloud is going through tough times, negotiations with Sony and Universal ended unsuccessfully after which Soundcloud had to remove all music of artists of the labels. Investors are unwilling to invest more money in the streaming service unless it is able to make deals with more record companies.

Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud which results in a large amount of unlicensed content on the service. The service is also popular for uploading mixtapes and remixes of songs which often also aren't licensed.

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