Iglesias's Music Streaming Suit Confronts Big Industry Issue

The case is part of the larger issue of how the music industry treats the sale of digital music versus physical counterparts like compact discs. “Few business relationships in the history of the music industry have achieved the commercial success attained by Enrique Iglesias and Universal: 100 million albums sold, billions of streams and repeat appearances at the top of the Billboard charts,” Iglesias's attorney James Sammataro, who is national head of Stroock's entertainment litigation practice group and managing partner of the firm's Miami office, said in a statement. “Despite this record-breaking success, Universal has wrongly insisted that artists like Enrique be paid for streams in the same manner as they are paid for physical records despite the fact that none of the attendant costs — production, distribution, inventory, losses — actually exist in the digital world.”

Iglesias is a Grammy Award winner who has outpaced all other artists on the Billboard Latin Chart by achieving more than two dozen No. 1 singles, and has surpassed music legends Prince and Michael Jackson as the male performer with the most top-selling dance singles, according to the lawsuit. Iglesias has also proven to be a hitmaker on social media and streaming services that deliver digital content via computers and mobile devices. His 2014 summer hit, “Bailando,” for instance, has amassed more than 2.46 billion views on YouTube.