Drummer Stewart Copeland, 73, and guitarist Andy Summers, 83, are suing the 74-year-old singer, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, over unpaid royalties from hits including Every Breath You Take, Roxanne and Message in a Bottle.
The dispute centres on how money from digital streaming is distributed. The band allegedly struck a verbal agreement in 1977 that each member would receive 15 per cent of royalties generated by the others’ compositions. However, streaming services and online platforms were not envisaged at that time, leading to conflicting interpretations of later agreements.
Copeland and Summers claim Sting and his company, Magnetic Publishing, owe more than £1.49 million in “arranger’s fees” from performance royalties, which are earned when a song is broadcast, streamed, performed live, or played publicly.
Sting’s legal team argued that a “professionally drafted” agreement in 2016 limited payments to “mechanical income from the manufacture of records”, rather than all sources of revenue, including digital streaming.
Since the case began in late 2024, Sting has made payments totalling more than £595,000 for “certain admitted historic underpayments”, the court heard. Written agreements formalising the band’s arrangements were drawn up in 1981, updated in 1997, and revised again in 2016.
Lawyers for Copeland and Summers argue the 2016 agreement should reflect the modern music industry, with streaming and other digital platforms generating substantial income. Every Breath You Take alone has been streamed more than three billion times on Spotify, making it one of the most performed songs in history.
Sting, who sold his music catalogue to Universal Music Group in 2022 in a deal reportedly worth between $250 million and $300 million, maintains that he has already overpaid his former bandmates.
Despite the dispute, the musicians’ history of professional rivalry has remained largely playful. Copeland recently told The Age in Australia: “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.”
