<\/p>\n
After the Police formed in 1977, the rock band\u2019s 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 \u201ckeep things sweet\u201d among the trio.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
According to British court documents made public this week, the bandmates behind such staples as \u201cEvery Breath You Take,\u201d \u201cRoxanne\u201d and \u201cMessage in a Bottle\u201d are embroiled in a legal dispute over whether Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, has properly paid the band\u2019s drummer, Stewart Copeland, and guitarist, Andrew Summers.<\/p>\n
A lawsuit by Copeland and Summers argues that Sting owes them \u201carranger\u2019s fees\u201d for income from the \u201cdigital exploitation\u201d of the Police\u2019s back catalog. The musicians estimate that Sting owes them \u201cin excess of $2 million,\u201d according to documents lodged with the High Court in London.<\/p>\n
Sting\u2019s legal team argues in a document submitted to the court that he has paid his former bandmates correctly and that the three musicians all signed an agreement in 2016 to draw a line under previous disputes around the \u201carranger\u2019s fees.\u201d Sting\u2019s lawyers called the current legal action \u201can illegitimate attempt\u201d to reinterpret that document.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A High Court spokesman said that an administrative hearing related to the case was scheduled to take place in January. A representative for Copeland and Summers declined an interview request, and a representative for Sting did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
In the band\u2019s seven-year career, the Police became one of rock music\u2019s biggest acts, winning six Grammy Awards and selling tens of millions of records. Yet the band members were often at loggerheads. \u201cWe fought cat and dog over everything,\u201d Sting recalled in a 2007 interview with The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n During a reunion tour in 2008, Sting joked onstage<\/a> at Madison Square Garden in New York that the \u201creal triumph\u201d of the band\u2019s getting back together was \u201cthat we haven\u2019t strangled each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the band\u2019s long time out of the public eye, its songs remain a huge draw \u2014 regularly covered by other artists and heard at weddings and on the radio. On Spotify, the group has 36 million monthly listeners<\/a>, and the service\u2019s users have streamed \u201cEvery Breath You Take,\u201d a slightly sinister hit about romantic obsession (\u201cEvery step you take \/ I\u2019ll be watching you,\u201d goes one lyric), over 2.8 billion times. In 2019, the American music licensing clearinghouse BMI reported that it had then become \u201cthe most-performed song<\/a>\u201d in the organization\u2019s catalog of 14 million compositions.<\/p>\n The current legal dispute is complex and concerns aspects of what is known in the music business as \u201cpublishing\u201d income \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n