It’s all funny business until someone doesn’t get their money and that’s exactly what happened to Kevin Hart, John Mulaney, Jim Gaffigan, and more as they got into a royalty dispute with the streaming giant, Spotify.
Lets one thing straight, royalty and copyright laws are very complicated. Musical artists that release a song or album will get performance and songwriter royalties, that is not the case with comedians.
Comics only walk away with performance royalty and nothing else for writing their specials or any other performance. This is where Spoken Giants step in and argued that comedians should get the same rights to musicians.
Spoken Giants is a global rights company that focuses on spoken word, which stand-up is a category in, incidentally.
Spotify however, does not see eye to eye in this case. They took the step to just take down all the content from hundreds of comics because they could not get into an agreement, stating to the rights group that the content will stay down till they come to an understanding.
(Credit: Kevin Hart/Twitter). 
(Credit: John Mulaney/Twitter).
Spotify was quoted to have a clear process when it comes to giving compensation to the comics, but instead of furthering discussions they are penalising the comics who are asking for equal treatment to musicians. Personally, this is a bit harsh from the streaming platform.
In music, songwriter royalties are a very basic revenue stream, so this is not an unfamiliar concept and our work is based on established precedents and clear copyright language.
Jim King, CEO of Spoken Giants.
A spokesperson from Spotify has responded amidst the ongoing dispute, stating they have paid a significant amount of money to put the content in question on their platform and they would like to continue to do so.
Then they pushed the blame to the other parties involved for this impasse that both parties have found themselves in.
At this point, it does feel like Spotify is acting like a Sicilian mob boss, holding the comics’ work hostage saying “If you ask more questions, you swim with the fishes”.
