US songwriters challenge ruling on licensing

New York

WHEN Michelle Lewis, a Los Angeles songwriter, gets her quarterly royalty statements from ASCAP, she receives a stark reminder of how songs are valued in the digital age. The tunes she writes for TV shows such as Disney's Doc McStuffins bring in thousands of dollars, but streaming outlets such as Pandora and Spotify yield less than US$100 combined.

"The honest truth is that if it weren't for the TV stuff, I'd be working at Starbucks," said Ms Lewis, who has writing credits on pop hits by Cher, Little Mix and Katharine McPhee. "There is no way I could afford to be a songwriter just on streaming and digital radio."

As the reach of streaming music has grown, songwriters - an essential but often invisible part of the music world - have become increasingly vocal about their unhappiness with the amount of compensation they receive from digital outlets. Those complaints have reached a peak since last month, when the Justice Department ruled that ASCAP and BMI, the two largest royalty clearinghouses, m…