As you might have read, there are now 2 class-action lawsuits worth about $350 million filed by songwriters against Spotify for non-payment of royalties, but the story is bigger than that in that something is happening that affects every content creator.

Here's a quick look at why these lawsuits are a symptom of a much larger problem. 

4. Spotify has been negligent. It's true that it didn't get the necessary licenses or send out the NOI for many songs written by Lowery and Ferrick and hundreds of others (even many Bob Dylan songs), and the company has acknowledged that. But that's not the real problem.

5. Spotify didn't necessarily know who the publishers were. This is more of a data entry problem than Spotify trying to withhold money from some songwriters. 

When a song is uploaded by the label, all of the metadata, even for publishing, is supposed to be entered. That said, publishing data is notoriously complicated, especially when there are multiple writers and publishers attached to a song.

This crucial data is often entered incorrectly, leading to license and royalty problems later.

6. Metadata entry is often left to interns. And poorly trained ones at that. The lowest person on the corporate totem pole frequently gets the job of entering the metadata, without much training as well. It's not uncommon for the data entry person to make a typing mistake, be confused by the requirements, or just be confused by the parameters. This, of course, leads to people not getting paid.

7. Metadata forms are different for each service. Someone that's good at filling out the forms for Apple Music might be completely befuddled by a section of the Spotify or Slacker form. If there's a time crunch involved, you get errors, and once that happens, again people end up not getting paid.

8. It's a widespread problem. Chances are the correct songwriter and publisher info hasn't been entered for most covers songs, karaoke versions, live recordings, etc. That means there are millions of streams not be paid, not because Spotify doesn't want to, but because they don't have the proper info.

Spotify and every other streaming service gets thousands of uploads every week and they're not in the business of verifying the supplied metadata. If the line for Publisher is filled in with some sort of data, that's enough for them to carry on as usual even though it might not be incorrect.

It would be great if there were metadata standards throughout the industry, and there's some work being done on that. As of now, that's not the case so these problems will continue to occur.