Sting and his former bandmates go to the high court over a royalties dispute this week – the latest chapter in the song’s remarkably fractious story
This week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.
Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,000 (£647,000) to redress what his lawyer called “certain admitted historic underpayments”. But there are still plenty of future potential earnings up for debate.
The dispute is not over some dusty forgotten hit, with the band members looking merely to redistribute old earnings – any interpretation of the agreements between the bandmates will have huge and ongoing financial impact. As the hearings open, Every Breath You Take sits in the Top 10 of the most-streamed songs daily worldwide on Spotify, racking up about 3.5m plays on that platform alone each day: more than some of the most popular songs of recent times such as Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather and Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s Die With a Smile. On Spotify, streams jumped by 89% in 2024 and have just kept going up, growing another 36% last year, with particular popularity in the Americas: the US, Mexico, Brazil, Germany and the UK are the song’s biggest markets.
