News that the Radio Music Licensing Committee is suing Irving Azoff’s new performing rights organization Global Music Rights for $42 million in a licensing spat, claiming “monopolistic” behavior, was the big story of the week.

Here are the other stories from the week worth noting:

GLOBAL SONGWRITER ROYALTY COLLECTIONS UP 8.5% TO €7.5BN IN 2015 (Music Business Worldwide)
Royalties for public performance rights posted a growth rate of 9.1%, climbing to €6.8 billion and accounting for 78.8% of overall collections.

BrandSpins Acquires Sync Licensing Firm MusicDealers (Digital Music News)
In 2015, MusicDealers scored $15 million in licensing revenue across TV, games, radio, YouTube, and even GoPro.  Over its multi-year lifespan, the company had multiple offices and roughly 50 employees at its peak.

Lyric-sharing deals aim to support songwriters (The Economist)
LyricFind has 4,000 users and more than 1m lyrics licensed legally in eight languages. The company doesn’t release exact royalty payment numbers, but pays millions to lyrics publishers each year.

WHAT DOES UNIVERSAL WANT FROM ITS NEW DEAL WITH SPOTIFY? (Music Business Worldwide)
The quality of our products is something that has a value and we are not of a mindset to decrease price to increase volume… if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Judge Allows Bid to Free 'We Shall Overcome' From Copyright (Billboard)
A New York federal judge rejected a publisher's bid to dismiss, ruling that the plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that lyrics in the first verse of "We Shall Overcome" were copied from material in the public domain and that there's been a fraud on the U.S. Copyright Office.

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