Members of the ’90s rock band Lit are suing to enforce a 50% streaming royalty rate supposedly set forth in their RCA Records deal from 1998 — a time when digital music streaming was still virtually nonexistent.
RCA’s parent company, Sony Music, faces the claims in a lawsuit filed Monday (March 2) by Lit frontman A. Jay Popoff, guitarist Jeremy Popoff, bassist Kevin Baldes and the estate of late drummer Allen Shellenberger. The band is best known for the hit 1999 single “My Own Worst Enemy,” which spent 11 weeks at No. 1 atop Billboard‘s Alternative Airplay chart and 20 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.
“My Own Worst Enemy” is still getting listens in the streaming era, with more than 500 million streams on Spotify to date. Sony pays Lit the basic 14% U.S. recorded royalty rate for the song’s plays on Spotify and other digital streamers, but the band alleges it’s entitled to more.
The heart of Lit’s argument is a clause in the band’s 1998 record deal with RCA that allocates it 50% of net proceeds from master use licenses of their music. In a parenthetical, the contract says an example of this would be “RCA’s license to another person of the right to embody a master recording on a website in a so-called ‘streaming’ format, which is not subject to the ‘digital download’ of that master recording by a viewer.”
It’s not clear how this clause made it into Lit’s record deal, since music streaming was still in its most nascent stage in 1998; MP3s were only invented in 1993, and the first mainstream streaming platforms like PressPlay and Rhapsody didn’t launch until the early 2000s. Even Napster, which hosted music downloading rather than streaming, didn’t arrive until 1999.
Still, Lit’s lawsuit says the language in its record deal is clear. The band alleges it has been trying since 2023 to renegotiate a higher royalty percentage, but Sony stonewalled with “a half-hearted defense” of the current rate and then stopped responding entirely.
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“[Sony’s] failure and/or refusal to account properly to plaintiffs for streaming royalties received from licenses from third-party DSPs under the 1998 agreement has damaged plaintiffs in excess of $800,000 in underpaid royalties as reflected on royalty statements rendered from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2026,” writes Lit’s attorney Chris Vlahos.
Lit is now suing for breach of contract and seeking to recover that $800,000 in allegedly underpaid royalties. The band also claims that lower royalty reports have “artificially depressed” SAG-AFTRA pension contributions and threatened their eligibility for union health insurance coverage.
Reached for comment on Tuesday (March 3), Vlahos told Billboard that litigation was a last resort for Lit: “This is something that we were hoping we could resolve before having to file a lawsuit,” he said.
A rep for Sony declined to comment on the matter.
