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.
It didn’t work.
According to British court documents made public this week, the bandmates behind such staples as “Every Breath You Take,” “Roxanne” and “Message in a Bottle” are embroiled in a legal dispute over whether Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, has properly paid the band’s drummer, Stewart Copeland, and guitarist, Andrew Summers.
A lawsuit by Copeland and Summers argues 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 “in excess of $2 million,” according to documents lodged with the High Court in London.
Sting’s 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 “arranger’s fees.” Sting’s lawyers called the current legal action “an illegitimate attempt” to reinterpret that document.
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.
In the band’s seven-year career, the Police became one of rock music’s biggest acts, winning six Grammy Awards and selling tens of millions of records. Yet the band members were often at loggerheads. “We fought cat and dog over everything,” Sting recalled in a 2007 interview with The New York Times.
During a reunion tour in 2008, String joked onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York that the “real triumph” of the band’s getting back together was “that we haven’t strangled each other.”
Despite the band’s long time out of the public eye, its songs remain a huge draw — regularly covered by other artists and heard at weddings and on the radio. On Spotify, the group has 36 million monthly listeners, and the service’s users have streamed “Every Breath You Take,” a slightly sinister hit about romantic obsession (“Every step you take / I’ll be watching you,” goes one lyric), over 2.8 billion times. In 2019, the American music licensing clearinghouse BMI reported that it had then become “the most-performed song” in the organization’s catalog of 14 million compositions.
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.
Those rights can be tremendously valuable. In 2022, Sting sold his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group for an estimated $300 million.
The court documents outline a complicated history of agreements over the division of income from the band’s biggest hits, all of which Sting has sole songwriting credit for.
Copeland and Summers say that in 1977 the band members verbally agreed that each would share with the others 15 percent of publishing income from any song they wrote for the band; money from sales of sheet music or from cover versions was exempted, Copeland and Summers said. Sting wrote the vast majority of the band’s hits.
The court documents say that in 1981, the bandmates formalized that arrangement in a series of written agreements, which were revised in 1997, a year after Copeland and Summers wrote to the Police’s lawyer saying that they were eager to find the original contract as they believed they had been underpaid “for a considerable period.”
In 2016, the legal documents say, the band signed a new agreement after “a dispute” over whether Sting should pay his former bandmates a share of publishing income from the Police’s songs being used in TV shows and movies.
In the legal documents, Copeland and Summers argue that Sting has not paid them fully for the “digital exploitation” of the Police’s many hits. Sting’s defense document says that he has paid his former bandmates their fair share and does not owe them anything more.
In fact, Sting’s lawyer’s add, depending on how the 2016 agreement is interpreted, Sting may owe Summers and Copeland nothing from the appearance of the band’s music online and therefore may have “substantially overpaid” them.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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