Sting paid his former bandmates in the Police £600,000 after the trio became embroiled in a royalties dispute over several of the group’s biggest hits, the High Court has been told.
The band’s hits including Every Breath You Take, Roxanne and Message in a Bottle continue to make a fortune in royalties but the distribution of the money has caused decades of ructions between the musicians.
Sting, 74, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, is being sued by the drummer Stewart Copeland, 73, and the guitarist Andrew Summers, 83.
Summers, Sting and Copeland were honoured as Knights of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2007
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At the heart of the dispute is the distribution of money from digital streaming, which the musicians could not have contemplated when they allegedly first struck a verbal agreement in 1977 that each member of the group should receive 15 per cent of the royalties generated by the other members’ compositions.
The other bandmates claim Sting and his company, Magnetic Publishing, owe more than £1.49 million in “arranger’s fees” from the money made from “performance royalties” from their hits.
Performance royalties are earned when a song is broadcast on TV or radio, streamed or downloaded, performed live or if the recording is played in a public place.
At the start of a two-day preliminary hearing, Robert Howe KC, representing Sting, said a “professionally drafted” agreement between the band members in 2016 stated that the money was owed only on “mechanical income from the manufacture of records”.
Summers performing in New York in May. Below, Copeland performing in Rome in June
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Since the legal action began in late 2024, Sting has paid more than £595,000 in “certain admitted historic underpayments”, the court was told.
The court was told that the verbal agreement between the musicians reached in 1977 was formalised through a written agreement in 1981. A further agreement was reached in 1997 and updated in 2016.
Ian Mill KC, for Copeland and Summers, said they understood the 2016 agreement to mean they were entitled to a share of money “from all publishing income derived from all manner of commercial exploitation”.
He said “nature and the industry and its products” had changed significantly. By 2016 when there was “very significant” income from digital, while in 1997 “it was “scarcely known”. He said Copeland and Summers would not have chosen to exclude income from streaming in the most recent agreement.
Spotify users have streamed the 1983 hit Every Breath You Take more than three billion times. The American music licensing organisation BMI said in 2019 that it was “the most-performed song” in its catalogue of 14 million compositions, The New York Times reported.
Sting sold his music catalogue to Universal Music Group in a deal thought to be worth between $250 million and $300 million in 2022. His lawyers claim that he has actually overpaid his bandmates.
The singer joked on stage during a reunion show in 2008 that the “real triumph [was] that we haven’t strangled each other”.
Copeland told The Age newspaper in Australia last week: “We did not ever fight in anger, physically, ever. We found much more effective ways of hurting each other with mental scalpels, and cudgels, and swords, and arrows, and clubs.”