HitPiece receives demand letter from recording industry association

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a demand letter to the attorneys of the music platform HitPiece insisting the platform cease and desist from selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sales. 

In a demand letter, an attorney writes a letter urging the recipient to perform a certain action. The RIAA demanded that HitPiece halt infringing on the intellectual property rights of musicians and take responsibility for selling NFTs of music without the original artist’s consent. 

RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow wrote in the letter, from February 4: 

“HitPiece appears to be little more than a scam operation designed to trade on fans’ love of music and desire to connect more closely with artists, using buzzwords and jargon to gloss over their complete failure to obtain necessary rights. Fans were led to believe they were purchasing an NFT genuinely associated with an artist and their work when that was not at all the case. While the operators appear to have taken the main HitPiece site offline for now, this move was necessary to ensure a fair accounting for the harm HitPiece and its operators have already done and to ensure that this site or copycats don’t simply resume their scams under another name.”

As The Block previously reported, music fans and artists slammed HitPiece for selling NFTs of artists’ work without their consent. HitPiece then apologized to its audience and pulled its marketplace off its website. HitPiece claimed in the apology to properly compensate artists in NFT sales, but the platform did not explain to The Block how artist payment worked upon request.