Peer covered my song; label has never credited me properly
What would you do?
An artist in the same niche genre as I covered one of my songs on their album a handful of years back. I know the artist but we're not buddies or regular contacts.
When the artist recorded the song, I simply advised them to take out a mechanical license when delivering the album to streaming services. The artist has a small label who handles distribution, so I emailed them the same instructions.
They released the album without a license and left the songwriter credit blank for my song on the streaming services.
Finding that out, I emailed again and the label promised to amend things but again failed to do so.
A couple of years ago, I noticed they had reuploaded the song again; this time they credited their own artist with writing the song.
I wrote to the artist about this, and the label incorrectly added me as a co-writer (and not even my full name as registered with my Performing Rights Organization).
The song has had probably 200,000 streams. No one's getting rich from that, but a principle is at stake.
Would you file takedowns with the streamers and just wipe it once and for all? That's what my gut says I should do.
Whether it's incompetence or disrespect, I feel that being nice about it achieves nothing.
EDIT: Submitted legal notices to Tunecore and Distrokid. Thanks for being real with me. If it were the other way around and I'd covered a smaller artist's song, people would chase me up for compliance and remittance and take it down.