Companies like Spotify have to pay license fees on both the composition and the recording to be able to stream songs.

The recording covers the actual audio file that is streamed.

The composition covers everything that is written down including the sheet music, the lyrics and so forth. However, the most important thing to remember is that, for every song you stream on Spotify or Pandora, there are two separate copyrights at play: The composition and the recording. Music licensing, to put it mildly, is extremely complicated. Note: This will be an extremely brief overview of music licensing, for more details, check out this 2017 article on the topic. A Quick Dive into Music (and Comedy) Licensing To answer that, we have to take a detour into the world of music licensing and see how comedy albums are both very similar and very different from music when it comes to licensing them for streaming. So, what is going on? Why is it suddenly a big enough issue that Spotify feels compelled to remove many of the most famous comedians from its service, and when will things likely return to normal? It’s actually a battle that has been brewing for several years but has only now reached a tipping point. However, the move didn’t come completely out of nowhere. The move was abrupt and left both the comedians and their fans in a lurch. Last week, Spotify removed a slew of popular comedians from their service including John Mulaney, Kevin Hart, Lewis Black and Tiffany Haddish to name just a few.

Spotify support buckles under from fans