Ministry Of Sound take on Spotify to protect not-so-secret recipe

Ministry of Sound don't really have much of a recorded music business, when you think about it. All it does is scrape together a bunch of other people's singles, bundle 'em up, and flog 'em off.

Trouble is, anyone can create similar bundles of tracks - as a Spotify playlist, for example. And that's what people are doing. And sometimes, they're just emulating the track-listing of MOS collections, and even pointing out that's what they're doing in the name.

This has upset the Ministry. Rather than chuckling "well, we've had two decades of being able to make money out of making mixtapes, which was taking the piss in the first place" and moving on, they're taking legal action, somehow thinking a list of songs is protected by copyright:

“Everyone is talking about curation, but curation has been the cornerstone of our business for the last 20 years,” says [CEO Lohan] Presencer. “If we don’t step up and take some action against a service and users that are dismissing our curation skills as just a list, that opens up the floodgates to anybody who wants to copy what a curator is doing.”

Oh, Lohan. The music industry has spent the time you've been busy shuffling "anthems" into different orders trying to prevent people from helping themselves to the songs themselves; you don't think trying to protect the idea that Jam And Spoon comes after Underworld is a doomed exercise?