On or about February 4, 2022, Billboard reported the RIAA sent a demand letter to HitPiece, a new beta website, because it was selling thousands of songs and album artwork NFTs using information from Spotify’s API without permission from the artists or their record labels.
The RIAA charged HitPiece with engaging in “the systematic and flagrant infringement of the intellectual property rights of the Record Companies and their recording artists on a massive scale…” Jared Freedman, RIAA’s Senior VP Litigation Lawyer, further stated that the recordings and artwork for sale as NFTs at HitPiece are “owned or exclusively controlled by the Record Companies” and their actions rise the lever of “outright theft… as outrageous as it is brazen.” The site has since been taken down.