The RIAA often leads the industry charges in legal actions for the digital music space and it has ridden into the fray once more. It is suing a streaming website and app called Spinrilla on behalf of several major record labels. The complaint alleges that Spinrilla isn’t paying artists such as Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye West for the use of their music. The RIAA said it found more than 21,000 copyrighted sound recordings uploaded to the platform. Spinrilla has a section about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on its website and has a template for takedown requests, but it has not weighed in yet on the action.
This is a type of legal case that has been cycling through the music industry since the early days of Napster. But just as the file-sharing platform morphed into an established player in on-demand streaming, many of the subjects of past inquiry have worked to make their services unquestionably above board. Others are charged and then disappear from the web (or resurface over and over in a game of legal whack-a-mole).