Earlier this year music publisher Wise Music Group filed papers in the High Court in London suing sheet music publisher Hal Leonard in a dispute over a 2018 licensing agreement.
Wise argued that Hal Leonard had failed to meet its obligations under the 2018 agreement and “refused to accept any change was required”. Hal Leonard was being “disingenuous”, it added, and “has no interest in addressing the issues with the performance of its obligations”.
As a result, Wise terminated the agreement. But, according to legal papers obtained by CMU, Hal Leonard “refused to accept the validity of the termination”, and so Wise asked the court to agree that its actions to end the agreement are valid. Hal Leonard has now formally responded, and in its own counterfiling insists that the claims made by Wise are “unfounded”, “misconceived” and, in some cases, “vague and embarrassing”.
Wise Music Group, then known as Music Sales Group, sold its own sheet music business to Hal Leonard in 2018, allowing it to focus on the expansion, management and administration of its various song catalogues. Owner Robert Wise said at the time that, while “printed music has played a special role in the long history of Music Sales”, the company's “direction of travel has been very clear in recent years as we continue the expansion of our portfolio of copyrights in all styles and genres across the world”.
Alongside the sale of the sheet music business, Wise and Hal Leonard also entered into the licensing agreement that forms the substance of the legal dispute.
Under that deal, Hal Leonard would have the right to print, publish and sell sheet music featuring compositions owned or controlled by Wise, paying royalties on any publications sold. Hal Leonard was obliged to employ “reasonable efforts” to promote and sell sheet music featuring Wise-controlled compositions. Those efforts, said the contract, should be “no less than” the sales effort that Hal Leonard made “in respect of its other publications”.
In its lawsuit, Wise argues that Hal Leonard’s efforts in relation to its catalogue have not been reasonable. Its business partner didn't take “sufficient steps” to make publications available digitally, despite the fact “the demand for printed music in digital formats, relative to physical formats, has been increasing for several years”. The legal filing cites minutes from a meeting in June 2021 that, it says, record Hal Leonard apologising for a “massive delay” to making various works available and that it “promised to do better”.
Wise details other delays, including actions that it says damaged its relationships with its composers, such as an occasion where a choral composition that premiered at the King’s College Carol Service and was broadcast by the BBC at Christmas 2022 “was still not available for purchase” in September of the following year. This meant lost sales “during what any reasonable music publisher would have appreciated was a crucial window of opportunity”.
Hal Leonard’s “very limited and slow activity” overall, Wise argued, “is far below what could reasonably be expected of a first-class global printed music publisher”. As a result, the lawsuit went on, total sales numbers for publications of Wise compositions are down compared to when it was running its own sheet music business. 2023 sales were 66% what was achieved prior to 2018.
For all these reasons, Wise says Hal Leonard is in breach of contract, the 2018 agreement has been terminated, and it should be able to claim damages.
In its own counterclaim filed at the start of July, Hal Leonard says that it has “complied with or exceeded” its obligations under the 2018 deal to “use reasonable efforts” to sell and promote publications featuring Wise’s compositions, adding that in some cases it has “never gone to such an effort” for any other composer.
It adds that the list of grievances in Wise’s lawsuit are “a series of minor complaints, largely of an administrative or logistical nature of the sort which is inevitable in the operation of a major commercial enterprise”.
The King’s College composition, says Hal Leonard, was made available as a digital version, “so any person wishing to buy the work immediately would have bought the digital version”. Demand for physical copies of a choral Christmas work “would have been minimal” between its release and autumn of the following year, it adds, “because performers do not ordinarily practice or perform Christmas music in that period”.
To that end, Hal Leonard argues, it is fully compliant with the 2018 agreement, most of Wise’s complaints are “misconceived”, and “to the extent that a handful of them have any validity at all, they are immaterial and have been remedied”. And even if all the grievances in the original lawsuit were true, it adds, these would not “demonstrate that Hal Leonard was in material breach of its obligations to use reasonable efforts to promote and sell Wise Music’s publications”.
Having picked through all the claims in the original lawsuit, the sheet music publisher then accuses Wise of breaching the deal itself. That claim relates to Wise’s 2023 acquisition of a controlling interest in another music publishing company, Edition Peters Group, and its subsequent printed music agreement with Faber Music.
The 2018 deal says that, when acquiring substantial new catalogues, Wise Music should enter into good faith negotiations with Hal Leonard about bringing those works into its existing sheet music deal. But, it alleges, that did not happen.
Whether things will hot up further as the case progresses through the court is anyone’s guess, but if it goes to trial it could provide some high-drama insights into the seemingly staid world of sheet music.
