The Department of Justice is taking sides in another hot-button antitrust battle, this time siding with Irving Azoff’s upstart music licensing firm against a group representing 10,000 radio s…
The division is reviewing 1,300 consent decrees, most of which are many decades old, to see if they still meet the needs of consumers. Just last month, the division announced that it was going to court to terminate the Paramount consent decrees, which ended the old studio system in 1949 and established the rules for the movie theater business. The division has argued that the old decrees have not kept pace with evolving markets, and may unduly restrain free enterprise.
Azoff has been looking to disrupt the licensing business since 2013, when he formed GMR to compete with BMI and ASCAP. He argued that he could get a better deal for artists, and signed about 70 songwriters and musicians. That gave GMR at least partial rights to hit songs performed by Pharrell Williams, Adele, Drake, John Lennon, U2 and others.
GMR filed its own antitrust suit, accusing the RMLC of operating an illegal price-fixing cartel. GMR contended that the stations were colluding with each other to keep payments to artists artificially low. The RMLC countered that the rate-setting regime had been in place for 78 years, had been blessed by federal courts and was itself the answer to anticompetitive conduct by the licensing firms. The RMLC filed a motion to dismiss GMR’s suit in July, which is still pending.
GMR’s attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, said the DOJ’s brief “vindicates the rights of artists and songwriters to be free from illegal price-fixing by radio stations.”
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