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Following a licensing disagreement with a major label, a number of well-known Bollywood songs have been taken off of Spotify.
Fans have expressed their rage after hundreds of songs from the Indian label Zee Music Company have been dropping off playlists, according to a report in The Independent.
The label, which claims to be the second most well-known in India, asserts that it is the source of more than 50% of the latest Bollywood music.
The song “Apna Bana Le” from the new film Bhediya has also been taken down despite being the most-streamed song in India on Spotify in recent weeks. Now, hugely popular soundtracks to films like Bajirao Mastani, Ram-Leela, and Gully Boy have all been taken down from the service.
Spotify said in a statement to Billboard: “Spotify and Zee Music were unable to come to a licensing agreement.
“Throughout these negotiations, Spotify has tried to find creative ways to strike a deal with Zee Music and will continue our good faith negotiations in hopes of finding a mutually agreeable solution soon.”
A new fund to support music and audio content by members of “historically marginalized groups” has only received 10% of the $100 million (£81.75 million) Spotify budget, it was recently revealed elsewhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast available only on Spotify, was the subject of controversy last year due to the use of the N-word and false information about the COVID-19 vaccine. As a result, the Creator Equity Fund was established.
However, Bloomberg has discovered that the initiative has gotten off to a sluggish start just over a year later. Bloomberg also obtained a memo that stated that at the beginning of the year, they were still finalizing the fund’s budget and were still sorting out their priority projects. Spotify was found to have taken months to hire staff and deal with “shifting priorities.”
Numerous publications have noted that the budget for Rogan’s Spotify contract and the Creator Equity Fund were identical (though others have estimated that his contract was worth twice as much).
The Rogan controversy from the previous year prompted artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, and Nils Lofgren to remove their back catalogs from the streaming service.
