Last week, a pair of lawsuits was filed against Spotify accusing the company of failing to acquire proper licenses—and thus failing to pay out the necessary royalties to songwriters—for certain songs being streamed on its service. In other words, technically, copyright infringement. If this feels like déjà vu, that's because the suits come just a few weeks after Spotify dropped $43.4 million to settle another class action lawsuit filed on behalf of songwriters. Last year, Spotify reached a $30 million settlement in a similar dispute with the National Music Publishers Association over unpaid royalties. If successful, these new lawsuits could yield up to $345 million in damages for songwriters. So what's going on here? It's easy to slap a dramatic headline onto a couple of paragraphs summarizing the lawsuits, but that wouldn't quite do justice to the complex (and admittedly unsexy) music industry controversy at hand: streaming royalties and how artists get paid for their work.