One of the most shocking stories in the streaming economy was a court case involving $23m of YouTube music royalties that should have gone to the rightsholders of a group of popular Latin American artists.
The accusation was that they had been siphoned off instead by a company called MediaMuv, which claimed to own the rights of that music when it did not.
This week there’s an important update on the case: co-founder Jose Teran has joined his business partner Webster Batista Fernandez in accepting a plea deal – in his case admitting to counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and transactional money laundering.
Billboard has the details of the plea deal, and of how MediaMuv carried out its scheme between 2016 and 2021. It involved falsely claiming more than 50,000 songs on YouTube, while also sending falsified contracts to rights-management firm AdRev, whose service they also used to claim royalties.
Songs recorded by the likes of Daddy Yankee and Anuel AA were among those claimed by the fraudsters.
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