Last month, comedian Bill Engvall got a very nice email from Sirius XM-owned streamer Pandora, congratulating him on reaching over 600 million streams of his work on its platform from 227,000 monthly listeners. It sounded like a noteworthy milestone for a major headlining comedian, especially one who has been in the game for over three decades. But the well-intentioned gesture alerted Engvall and his team to one major issue: He hadn’t been paid for any of those streams.
“It’s like sending someone a birthday card that says, ‘Whoops I forgot to give you a gift,’” Engvall told the Los Angeles Times.
Last week, Engvall was one of several comedians — including the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin along with Ron White and Andrew Dice Clay — to sue Pandora in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California over its failure to pay the proper amount of royalties for their copyrighted jokes.
