The recent press surrounding artist “takedowns” on Spotify, fueled by Neil Young’s protest of the Joe Rogan podcast, resurfaces questions about when an artist can remove their works from streaming services. Since the rise in popularity of streaming platforms, we have seen many songs and catalogs pulled for a variety of reasons, and we will almost certainly see more in the years to come.
Artists including Taylor Swift and Prince have pulled music from Spotify because of reservations about digital streaming, while Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in 2014 elected to pull his music because he felt the platform did not adequately compensate new artists.
Situations like these give rise to a considerable number of questions: Is it only the big artists like Neil Young who have this right, or do all artists? How are artists and songwriters treated differently? Do artists have different rights on video streaming services than they have on audio streaming services?
Let’s see …
When it comes to sound recordings on audio-only, on-demand streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, artists can take down content, either directly or through their labels.
Streaming services acquire the distribution rights to sound recordings from an artist’s record labels. The distribution deals generally cover all of a label’s controlled sound recordings, but they may contain some exceptions.
In most cases, an artist’s record label controls the distribution rights in the artist’s music, so the label has the ultimate decision-making control. Some artists have negotiated take-down rights with their record labels. As a practical matter, in most cases, the record label will generally defer to artist interests, so if an artist wants to pull down content, the label will usually comply. When record labels negotiate distribution deals with streaming services, they will generally contain provisions that allow labels to take down content for artist-relations reasons.
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