As Rolling Stone notes,
Everybody knows “Every Breath You Take.” It’s the biggest hit the Police ever had, one of the most famous tunes of the Eighties. It spent 8 weeks at Number One in the classic pop summer of 1983. In 2019, BMI officially proclaimed it “the Most Played Song in radio history,” breaking the 22-year record set by “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.”
The hit is credited to Sting. However, ex-bandmates Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland have now sued him in London High Court, claiming that deserve to be credited – and paid.
As Rolling Stone explains,
The bottle-blonde British threesome famously hated each other, so this might just seen like the latest of their nonstop battles. They recorded it while regularly punching each other out in the studio. Sting said he spent half the Synchronicity tour with a broken rib, after one of his backstage brawls with Copeland.
Nobody is disputing that Sting wrote the lyrics, chords, and melody for the song, as he usually did in the Police. He has sole credit for almost all of the band’s biggest hits.
As the New York Times notes,
After the Police formed in 1977, the rock band’s frontman, Sting, agreed to pay his two bandmates 15 percent of some royalties that he earned from songs written for the group in an effort to “keep things sweet” among the trio.
The original version of the song had an organ part that was replaced with guitar arpeggios added by Andy Summers.
An arpeggio is a type of chord in which the notes that comprise a chord are individually sounded in a progressive rising or descending order. An arpeggio must contain notes of a least three pitches.
Summers has said that the song “was going in the trash” until he played on it.
The issue in this case, according to Rolling Stone, is what counts as “songwriting,” versus what counts as “arranging.”:
It’s an eternal argument for musicians, but it was different in the old days, when bands made money from album sales. That revenue stream has dried up, which means publishing royalties matter more than ever. The fights get uglier as musicians get older and their grandkids get thirstier.
What makes someone a co-writer of a song under US copyright law?
According to the Dramatist’s Guild,
you should evaluate how much original expression a person actually contributed. If it is one line or a lyric, which you as the author have the sole right to keep or reject, then that does not merit a co-writing credit since the ultimate decision to include it rests with you. This notion comes from the doctrine of joint authorship.
Under U.S. Copyright Law, in order for someone to be considered a joint author to a work, they must contribute an independent copyrightable contribution AND there must be intention by the authors to be co-authors. Intention can be measured by the level of control of a person exerts over the work, i.e. if the decision to include something or not lies solely with one person, then that would demonstrate an intention NOT to be co-authors.
The BBC explains that music royalties are generally split into two separate categories:
- Performance royalties – which are paid when a song is played in public, on the radio, or via a streaming service.
- Mechanical royalties – paid when a song is pressed to CD or vinyl, but also when it is streamed on demand.
Summers and Copeland contend they should be paid for both of these categories, while Sting says they’re only entitled to mechanical royalties.
As the Times explains, Copeland and Summers argue that Sting owes them “arranger’s fees” for income from the “digital exploitation” of the Police’s back catalog. The musicians estimate that Sting owes them more than $2 million.
Sting’s lawyers argued that he paid his former bandmates correctly and that the three musicians had settled all previous disputes about “arranger’s fees” in 2016.
As the Times notes,
The current legal dispute is complex and concerns aspects of what is known in the music business as “publishing” income — those related to the copyrights for songwriting, as opposed to recordings. Songwriters, and the publishers who represent them, are entitled to royalties whenever their compositions are performed on radio or streaming services, sold on CDs or vinyl, performed in public or used in movies or television.
In 2022, Sting sold his songwriting catalog, including the song at issue, to Universal Music Group for an estimated $300 million.
A hearing on the matter is scheduled for January 2026.
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