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Jay Z‘s lawyers stays busy. Hova and TIDAL are being sued for $5M by a band that claims the music streaming service didn’t pay them their proper royalties. 

Reports Entertainment Weekly:

TIDAL, the streaming service launched by Jay Z in 2015, now faces a $5 million class-action lawsuit. Brought by Yesh Music and John Emanuele of the band American Dollar, the lawsuit alleges that TIDAL streamed 116 of the group’s songs without paying royalties.

According to court documents obtained by EW, the plaintiffs say that TIDAL “created its now 25 million track library by dumping all of the music from independent artists into the TIDAL Music Service without serving NOIs.” A Notice of Intent to Obtain Compulsory License — an NOI — is a necessary step businesses must take to legally distribute music. The plaintiffs also allege that TIDAL’s actions “diluted the paid per-stream rate for royalty payments by up to 35 percent.” Jay Z pledged last year that TIDAL would provide musicians with an industry-best 75 percent royalty rate.

The irony here is that TIDAL claims to be up to date on its royalty payments. But according to American Dollar’s lawyers, they paid the wrong people.

“TIDAL is up to date on all royalties for the rights to the music stated in Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele’s claim and they are misinformed as to who, if anyone, owes royalty payments to them,” a TIDAL representative said in a statement to EW. “As Yesh Music, LLC admits in their claim, TIDAL has the rights to the Master Recordings through its distributor Tunecore and have paid Tunecore in full for such exploitations. Their dispute appears to be over the mechanical licenses, which we are also up to date on payments via Harry Fox Agency our administrator of mechanical royalties.”

Basically, TIDAL is maintaining that Yesh is asking for their money from the wrong people, and shouldn’t have even named the Jigga Man in their lawsuit.

All the songs belonging to Yesh Music have been removed from TIDAL. So they won’t be making any money off of those.

Recently, TIDAL fired a pair of its execs.

Photo: screen cap