If the songwriters prevail it could cost Spotify tens of millions of dollars in unpaid royalties. And according to experts in the music industry, this may be only the beginning, because other streaming services reportedly commit the same violations.

The named plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is David Lowery, an outspoken musicians’ rights advocate and frontman of rock bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. He says his songs have been streamed hundreds of thousands of times without his permission.

Lowery, who also teaches music business at the University of Georgia, alleges that Spotify streams his songs without getting licenses from him to do it or paying him accordingly.

In a statement, Spotify says it has tried to find rights holders, but “the data necessary to confirm the appropriate rights holders is often missing, wrong or incomplete.” Spotify says it has set aside a fund to pay songwriters when they are identified. Earlier this month, it announced that it would invest in “a comprehensive publishing administration system” to better track royalty information.

“The point is not that they didn’t set aside royalties; the point is that they never got the licenses in the first place,” Lowery tells NPR. “There appears to be no licenses on my songs and a great number of songwriters’ songs. Setting aside the royalty, what is that royalty based on? There’s no license.”

Lowery’s lawyer, Sanford Michelman, says Spotify may owe tens of millions of dollars not just in unpaid royalties but also for copyright infringement, which can run as high as $150,000 per violation.

Music streaming services have been a growing and popular business, but they have faced opposition from artists including Prince, Thom Yorke, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and most recently Adele.

A major sticking point has been how these services pay the musicians for distributing their music. One study of the music business by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship suggested earlier this year that anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of music payments don’t make it to their rightful owners.

And as NPR’s Joel Rose has reported, the songwriters often get a far smaller share of those payments:

“The way those royalties are split is far from equal, in part because there are two different types of copyright holders for every song a streaming service plays. One is the owner of the sound recording — that’s usually the artist or the record label. The other is the person (or persons) who wrote the song, or someone else to whom rights have been granted, like a music publisher.”

(Rose explained in detail the legal framework that guides the music industry in a story earlier this year.)

Here’s a bit of background on Lowery’s case from The Wrap:

“The class-action suit identifies members of the class to be anyone who owns reproduction and distribution rights of copyrighted songs that have been played by Spotify.

“Lowery has long been an advocate for artists’ interests as the music business shifts its business models. In a 2013 blog post, he recounted how online radio service Pandora paid him just $16.89 in songwriter royalties for more than 1 million spins of Cracker’s hit song ‘Low.’ ”

Lowery’s lawsuit only names Spotify and doesn’t include the major song publishers (Sony, for example, has an agreement with Spotify). But Jeff Price, CEO of publishing rights tracking company Audiam, says he has seen a similar problem at all the services, including Apple, Google and Tidal.

“This suit brings to the foreground an endemic problem that has existed since the launch of the interactive streaming music services,” Price says.

You can read the full court filing from Lowery below.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Every year, the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition hosts a summit that tackles the trickiest issues facing musicians today, and it’s not afraid to get into the weeds.

At this year’s conference, held in October at Georgetown University in D.C., musicians, educators, reps and DJs took on the big subjects, including music education and the modern role of radio. But many panels went deeper, examining the nuts-and-bolts of the digital music economy — and exposing new fault lines in the process.

Here are the three biggest ideas I heard at this year’s Future of Music Policy Summit.

Digital music has a transparency problem

The decline of album sales has been a long time in the making. But as the physical-music market shrinks, its replacement — digital streaming — has ushered in a new set of problems. If there was one point central to most discussions at the Future of Music Policy Summit, it was how streaming services have institutionalized the expectation that music should be widely available for free.

“The future of music is being built and musicians are being left out of it,” said musician Tift Merritt. “That’s like building a house with bricks you didn’t pay for.”

The big culprits, of course, are digital services like Spotify and Apple Music, which many panelists decried as opaque.

Songwriter Shelly Peiken — who has written chart-topping hits including Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” — sat on a panel of professional songwriters. “When streaming became the new business model,” Peiken said, “the laws that dictated how songwriters get paid didn’t take into account a digital universe.”

But those criticizing the lack of transparency and fairness in how artists are paid also found a classic villain in major record labels.

Told that Spotify does in fact pay rights holders — i.e. record labels — former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner earned applause for his response: “But the rights holders are extremely dishonest,” he quipped.

Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes added, “We don’t even have enough information to blame anybody. The record labels own part of Spotify. If they don’t pay the record labels the money, maybe it’s because they have a deal with the record labels.”

The only way to get transparent information about streaming revenue for his own songs, Carnes said, “is under discovery in a court case or if a North Korean hacker tells me.”

Musicians need to be more than artists

So what happens when musicians, managers, record labels and digital distributors all sit down and discuss potential solutions to these problems?

Liv Buli of Pandora’s Next Big Sound summarized the industry’s perspective succinctly: “You can complain about it, but when we’re seeing people succeed is when they adapt to it.”

Digital-platform representatives seemed to define adaptation as executing effective social-media campaigns, aggregating and analyzing data and efficiently marketing merchandise and ticket sales to a core fan base. But who should have to do that work? One discussion offered a clear answer: artists should.

“Making Moments Matter: Musicians and Time Management” focused on how musicians can balance their artistic work with the increasing need to self-manage, self-promote and self-release.

At the policy summit, the clear message was that artists must be playing a fairly sophisticated numbers game to be taken seriously in the music business.

Musicians had mixed responses to the idea that they should be taking on a more active role in self-promotion. I asked Shelby Peiken how wearing more hats affects musicians and songwriters.

“If a musician wakes up every day and focuses on his or her craft, they’re going to get better and better at it,” Peiken said. “If they also have to spend time and energy honing social-media skills, booking dates [and] liaising with band members, it’s possible their art will not get the attention it needs and their music will suffer.”

That thought seemed to be at the heart of a key question from bassist Melvin Gibbs.

“My job is to move crowds,” Gibbs said, addressing a wonky panel of data specialists. “It took me as long to learn how to move crowds as it took for you to learn how to do what you do [with analytics]. How am I expected to do both?”

That prompted a response from CD Baby’s Tracy Maddux that may have sounded hollow to artists in the audience. “It’s incumbent on an artist not to be a business person,” he said, “but to surround themselves with business people that they trust.”

Maddux’s comment didn’t jibe with what other industry spokespeople had said throughout the summit. After two days of music reps touting the importance of social-media strategies, the clear message was that artists must already be playing a fairly sophisticated numbers game to even be taken seriously in the music business.

Musicians are laborers

Another eyebrow-raising moment came when former Interscope data analyst Kiran Gandhi offered what she admitted was forced optimism: “What a joy to be in a broken music industry,” Gandhi said. “More so than ever, artists are relevant in the industry.”

While “joy” may not have been the word of choice for many musicians at the summit, Gandhi did point to another emerging consensus: that musicians, whether by choice or necessity, are finally starting to build a movement to advocate for themselves.

Building stronger unions for musicians was among the more rousing strategies suggested during the conference.

The socialist-leaning Jenner chastised musicians for not unionizing. “The problem is you Americans care far too much about competition and not enough about cooperation and not enough about unions,” he said.

“We can think ‘artist’ with a capital A all we want,” echoed Andy Schwartz, a representative from the American Federation of Musicians, “but in the minds of the people who pay us, we are labor.”

Another model that came up was the Fair Trade Music movement, which has put down roots in D.C. as well as places like Seattle.

“Can we apply the fair-trade food model to drive for transparency and change in the music industry?” asked Panos Panay of the Berklee Institute during a keynote talk.

On the tail of the Music Cities Convention that took place at Georgetown University one day beforehand, the idea that local city governments could be doing more to boost their local music communities became a point of consensus.

“We have been stuck, in the music industry, in a very negative dialogue,” said Shain Shapiro, the managing director of Sound Diplomacy. But he called the Music Cities movement unifying.

Transforming the role governments play in the arts, Shapiro said, is “agnostic to the debate over some of the more negative divisive arguments.”

Read David Combs’ three-part series on the economy of DIY music.

Top photo by Flickr user Jason McELweenie used under a Creative Commons license.

Yanez worries that more artists will follow Taylor Swift‘s lead and pull their music from the streaming service, though she believes this is their right. Aside from the limits to Spotify’s library, offline listening has also been a problem for her on long drives when she doesn’t plan ahead. She expects other services to compete with her current preference, though, and she’s willing to think big about what tomorrow might hold (“chips in our ears or brains?”).

“The only thing I know for sure is that I love music so much, it gets me through my days, it comforts me, it excites me,” Yanez writes in an email. “And when I can’t listen it frustrates me.”

With Apple poised to roll out a full-fledged streaming music offering of its own sometime soon, the battle between streaming and downloads will effectively be over. So it’s worth taking stock of what, exactly, would be the ideal streaming experience for listeners like Yanez, as well as for the artists and labels whose music makes the whole system possible.

Spotify, which now counts 15 million paying subscribers, has used the 40 million mark as a magic number for when it will be paying a more traditional amount to musicians. The suggestion, essentially, is that scale is the key to creating a world where everybody gets what they want.

With that in mind, NPR asked a wide range of people, well, what they want — through crowd sourcing and traditional interviews — and also collected commentary about streaming from public statements by musicians and others.

Listeners who responded to our crowdsourcing questions about their streaming utopia weren’t, by and large, asking for science fiction. Many were happy with their current digital tools, from Google’s Play Music All Access to the nonprofit concert archives at archive.org, and just wished for slight improvements, though they frequently expressed concern that artists should be getting a bigger cut of the profits.

High quality audio was one common desire, as was improved cover art work and liner notes, but more often perfection looked like a matter of minor tweaks.

Laura Whitehead, a 31-year-old high school teacher from Baltimore, Md., has had a $10-a-month Spotify subscription for two or three years, and her only complaint is that she can’t control playlists on her phone as well as on her computer — “par for the course with most apps,” she tells NPR in an email.

“When I’m tired of something or I don’t want it anymore, I just delete it without feeling like I’ve wasted my money,” Whitehead says. “To be honest I’d probably pay a little more.”

Price, of course, hasn’t become less of an object for all. For Hana Sambur, a streaming utopia would unite unlimited music from currently disparate music platforms, whether Spotify or Soundcloud. And it would do so at a rate that makes sense for her as a 21-year-old international student from Indonesia, studying at the University of Washington.

“A $7.50 per month fee, I think, is reasonable, as it recognizes the ethical responsibility of paying back musicians who worked hard for their art,” she writes in an email.

Among musicians, accustomed to disappointing royalties statements from streaming and a lack of artistic control over the format, a perfect world for digital music may be harder to imagine.

Jay Z’s contentious rollout of his recently acquired high-end streaming service Tidal signals his streaming utopia might prioritize lossless audio, plus an ownership stake for artists — at least, the most established ones.

Aloe Blacc, writing in Wired last November, called for regulatory changes allowing songwriters to earn more than the $4,000 he says he received domestically from Pandora for co-writing the No. 1 hit “Wake Me Up!” by Avicii. Björk, in a recent Fast Company interview, praised the Netflix model, saying that perhaps music, like cinema, should be a physical experience before it’s available for streaming.

For musicians at a more modest level, trading the old record industry for new streaming overlords can be a case of “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.”

“The big issue is finding something that is actually ‘artist friendly’ and not just ‘music business friendly,'” emails Casey Dienel, who has recorded three albums as White Hinterland. “I’m tired of the rhetoric that streaming will ballast the fallout of the recording industry — an industry that has a checkered past when it comes to exploitation and trust issues with artists to begin with.”

Dienel worries about artists’ control over the listening experience, not only their compensation. Comparing the current streaming process to “buying pre-packaged ground beef in the store,” she envisions a utopia where listeners could gain a deeper knowledge of their music’s sources and context. Specifically, she praises EMA’s 2014 digital zine Back to the Void, released through the web platform New Hive, and the online setup of Nicolas Jaar, whose Other People label offers its own $10-a-month subscription service.

Rebecca Gates, a solo musician and arts advocate who formerly led the ’90s indie-rock band The Spinanes, voices similar suspicions about industry forces. She’s putting out her own music now and has chosen not put it on Spotify, although she suggests she’d be open to starting her own small subscription service for fans on her email list.

“Who is benefiting the most?” she asks of the current streaming landscape. “It’s huge corporations. It’s a wealth and data grab.”

Fred Thomas, an indie-pop stalwart who recently released the solo album All Are Saved, remembers seeing new faces at shows — but selling fewer records — during a 2010 tour of Sweden, when Spotify was available in Europe but not yet in the United States.

“All the different streaming services — it’s a joke,” he says in an email. “How could one possibly be better than another? It’s all free music that almost never sees any money coming back to the artist unless they’re world famous.”

Sharky Laguana, who led the ’90s and early-’00s indie-rock band Creeper Lagoon, urges a change in how streaming companies calculate royalties.

Currently, in what Laguana describes as a “pari-mutuel” system, Spotify takes about a 30% share of its total income, and musicians (often via labels or another intermediary) receive a cut of the rest that’s based on their percentage of the service’s overall plays. Every listen ends up counting for the same amount of money, whether a given subscriber listened to 10 songs in a month or 1,000.

In a Medium post last November, Laguana proposed shifting to a system based on “subscriber share,” where only the artists that a subscriber listens to would split up the royalties paid out from that subscriber’s monthly fee. “The fairest measure of value is whatever the subscriber decided to do with the resources that were given for them with the money they paid,” he tells NPR. “If I listen to Led Zeppelin 25% of the time, Led Zeppelin gets 25% of my money.”

Streaming, however utopian, isn’t yet the end-all, be-all for all types of artists. Take singer-songwriter Josh Ritter. While streaming tends to be more convenient for his younger fans than his older ones, both cohorts seek out Ritter’s physical albums and live shows “as a mile marker in their relationship with him as an artist,” says his manager, Darius Zelkha, of Tough Love Artist Management. “In that sense, we’re lucky to have a fan base that toes the line here.”

In general, though, the line Zelkha describes is clearly moving. As the number of people willing to pay for a streaming services rises, it makes sense that the number who are willing to pay for physical albums will dwindle. At the very least, sales of CDs — which last year, at 141 million units, were down 82% from their 2000 level, according to Nielsen Music — would be set for a continued slide. (By comparison, vinyl album sales in 2014, despite hitting an historic high, totaled only 9.2 million copies.)

Against that backdrop of streaming overtaking physical discs, skepticism about the new paradigm’s ability to make up for what artists have lost over the last 15 years runs as high as a band that once signed one of the most lucrative recordings contracts ever. “For the consumer it’s great,” says R.E.M.’s longtime manager Bertis Downs. “[For artists] it’s hard to see the math ever working out.”

From a label perspective, larger outfits are betting the current streaming system could evolve into a flourishing ecosystem.

“An ideal streaming world would be one where there are dozens upon dozens of different kinds of unique services for fans to choose from, and all pay fair market rates to music creators while sustaining thriving businesses,” says Cara Duckworth, a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the major labels. “Fans are happy, artists earn a healthy return and labels can invest in artists. Streaming is still a nascent business. We’re confident we can get there.”

Martin Mills, founder and chairman of the Beggars Group, a U.K. group of independent labels (many of which release music in the United States as well), has taken a public stand in streaming-related debates before, but he too speaks as if the utopia might not be too distant.

“We’re happy with how Spotify looks as a role model, and are confident about their ambitions for future growth, especially of the premium tier,” Mills says in an emailed statement. “Our artists are already seeing very significant benefits on their royalty statements and with their royalty checks from audio streaming income. But we also see the future as a mixed consumption model — streaming will keep growing, but downloading and physical are not going away anytime soon.”

Representatives of indie labels and artists have recently criticized a digital music business they see as damagingly opaque. Mills referred to “reduced transparency” in a February speech for a U.K. trade group the Entertainment Retailers Association. At the same event, Radiohead manager Brian Message also warned of non-disclosure agreements that mask tactics he said “distort the market,” including “equity positions at the expense of streaming rates.”

Some see sunlight as the best solution. Darius Van Arman, cofounder of the Secretly Group, a U.S. group of indie labels, explains that, by helping to build trust in an area riddled with artist criticisms about money, greater transparency could go hand in hand with an increase in the number of paid streaming subscribers.

“A more transparent licensing structure will ease some of the knee-jerk reactions and really help the creative community embrace streaming,” Van Arman says. “By doing that, I think there’s a greater chance that streaming will grow.”

In the business world, disclosure requirements tend to be enforced by federal regulators. Music is no exception.

Tony Kiewel, VP of A&R at Sub Pop, says streaming royalty rates in his perfect world would be set with government oversight, as is already the case for the so-called “mechanical” royalties paid for songwriting. “This would undercut the troubling trend of major labels brokering deals that grant them ownership stakes in the streaming companies in exchange for rates which may not in fact be in their artists’ best interests,” he explains in an email, noting his thoughts don’t necessarily reflect Sub Pop’s position.

For smaller labels, a streaming utopia might literally be “no place.”

Leeor Brown, who founded the Friends of Friends label in 2009, says that while “realistically an ideal streaming service is one that pays appropriately,” he worries that a short-lived moment when smaller artists could make a decent living may be coming to an end.

DFA Records label manager Kris Petersen concedes, “The strategy we’re having is, we’re sort of shrinking down a bit to match whatever market there is left for people who will actually pay an adequate price for music.”

What ultimately matters is the connection between audiences and artists, not between audiences and streaming providers, say Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom, co-executive directors of CASH Music, an artist career-sustainability nonprofit co-founded by Von Doom, Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh and L7’s Donita Sparks.

“Our ideal view of a streaming service would be one where artists and music are valued; where the service facilitates that artist/audience connection rather than trying to dominate it,” Vail and Von Doom write in a joint email. “That’s the only healthy way forward for artists of all sizes, and the long-term health of artists is vital to any music business.”

The idea that the valuable relationship is the one between creators and listeners puts a level of responsibility on music lovers. Not all music is valuable to any one person, perhaps, but some music has a great value. How much that’s reflected in the marketplace is for audiences to decide.

To electronic-pop artist Mauro Remiddi, who has released two albums as Porcelain Raft, in a way the music industry was ever thus. He points out that many people have long been what he calls “DIY streamers,” whether recording audio cassettes from the radio or videotapes from MTV.

“Let’s accept that in our century people pile up music, most of us never even listen to all the music we download (at times for free) or have on our streaming playlist,” Remiddi says in an email. “Here’s the catch. Stream for free, but if you find yourself going back to a certain song, to a particular album and you find yourself captured by that artist’s way of representing the world then you should support it [with purchases].”

Free music has been available to a lesser extent for decades, in other words, and so has the ideal way of expressing the worth of the music: some actual money returning to musicians.

Indeed, Acacia DiCiaccio, a 25-year-old marketing professional from Whitinsville, Mass., describes a streaming utopia close to concept of the so-called celestial jukebox. A self-acknowledged “huge music nerd,” she has shifted over the past few years from downloads on an iPod to Spotify streaming. In her utopia, both of these libraries would be integrated — which, to be sure, some services aim to do today — and it would all fit on her phone.

Her perspective, shared in an email to NPR, also illustrates that the perfect worlds of listeners, artists and musicians may forever be slightly out of synch, in a way that perhaps is endemic to a market-based society.

“For something like this I’d be willing to pay a subscription fee or one-time purchase fee,” she says, “although in a utopia it would all be free.”

Does she think that musicians should still be paid? “Definitely,” she says, when asked. “In utopia, they’d be paid for streaming more than they are getting paid now by Spotify and other streaming services,”

Given the unresolved dissonances between the priorities of artists, labels and listeners — let alone technology companies — a world dominated by streaming sounds like a work in progress.

In the digital music economy, nobody’s perfect.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Today, the original iPod, which was discontinued after just 13 years, looks as quaint as Sony’s Walkman cassette player, which survived more than 30. Last year, according to a report by Nielsen SoundScan, sales of digital songs dropped by more than 12 percent. Digital album sales were down almost 10 percent. They will not rebound in 2015.

Instead, more music fans are turning to free, ad-supported and paid-subscription services that offer instant access to libraries that would make the wildest dreams of the iPod user seem tame. The era of streaming music is upon us, and if you need writing on the wall, turn to the relentless coverage of Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music, a subscription service that is scheduled to be rolled into the iTunes platform sometime this year, possibly as soon as next week.

The timing can’t be an accident. Apple stands to gain plenty by luring its hundreds of millions of users to a subscription-based streaming service, but it stands to lose, as well: The transition will surely speed the decline of the single-song download, and iTunes, the world’s largest music store, will feel that pain acutely. Apple’s entry into the market isn’t the signal that the world is ready for streaming music; it’s proof that the transition has already begun.

So over the next week, rather than waiting to see when iTunes will launch its attack on established services like Spotify, we’re going to examine the world of streaming music that is upon us in a series called Streaming At The Tipping Point.

As these services have taken hold — Nielsen says that in 2014, on-demand streaming rose 54 percent — the news media has primarily covered them in two ways: as generators (but not always fair distributors) of cash and as technological novelties.

The question of money — of royalties — is a crucial one to the survival of the recording industry. But streaming music has unlocked other new questions for the musician and fan alike: of ownership, of taste and of morality. Do we listen differently when we have unlimited options? Does the rise of the streaming service eliminate the very need for a library of one’s own, or does it just change how we acquire and interact with that library? Do your musical preferences belong to you? What role do listeners play in ensuring the life of music and the livelihood of musicians?

For a large part of the recording industry, the move to embrace streaming actually solves a long-time paradox: one of ownership. Over digital music’s 30-year evolution, from the public introduction of the compact disc in 1981 to the international expansion of Spotify in the last half-decade, the question of whether listeners owned the music they purchased got murkier.

In an earlier era, there was no such question — buying a vinyl record meant you could listen to the music until you wore it out, filed it away forever or grew a new set of ears and snapped the old disc in half.

Call the CD — and the digital files it so precariously contained, the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels — the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home and make a copy (or many copies), that control seemed to imply ownership. The recording industry’s fight against that principle took on the form of invasive digital rights management software, advertising campaigns, threats and lawsuits. You weren’t buying the music itself when you purchased an album or a song, it said, just the right to listen to it. But the MP3, the digital format gone airborne, turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn’t have the right to make copies and share them with strangers, but every new piece of technology made the counter-argument.

Streaming, at least the label-sanctioned version, puts the genie back in the bottle. Every time you click play on a streaming service, from Pandora to YouTube to Spotify, you’re licensing the right to listen to the song in that particular moment, whether you pay a subscription or sit through an ad. Ownership is never even an option. You listen, you license. If you want to listen again, you license again. In this way, streaming music suggests the passing of two eras: the digital download, but also the concept that fans might possess music itself.

No format lives forever. The LP, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 — each one dominated the market for about 15 years before ceding to the next technological advance. Will this latest revision define a new relationship between fans and cloud-bound digital files? The truth is, listeners bend each format to the utility they desire, and adapt to its particular attributes. The question we’ll ask over the next week is this: How will streaming change us?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.