The campaign at a glance

Respondent	Sirius XM Radio — satellite radio, ~33M subscribers
Legal theory	Deceptive pricing: advertised plan prices excluded a company-invented “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” adding 21.4% at billing; plus Electronic Funds Transfer Act claims
Lead counsel	Hattis, Lukacs & Corrington (Bellevue, WA), with DeNittis Osefchen Prince
Forum	AAA consumer arbitration (01-23-0002-6406, 01-25-0003-3668) + SDNY, W.D. Wash., and California state court
Scale	~70,000 purported arbitration claims per SiriusXM’s own 10-Q 2; 30,735 demands visible in AAA disclosure data 1
Duration	June 2023 → May 2026 (~35 months, first filing to AAA closure)
Outcome	Global settlement signed January 13, 2026, resolving most remaining arbitration claims and five named class actions; terms undisclosed, “not material” per SiriusXM 2

The story

SiriusXM advertised music plans at prices like “$5/mo for 12 months.” At checkout — or, for phone signups, only on the credit card statement — a “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” appeared, inflating the real price by 21.4% ⁴. The fee wasn’t a government charge and wasn’t a royalty pass-through in any regulated sense. It was, plaintiffs alleged, a profit center dressed up to look like a tax.

Hattis, Lukacs & Corrington — a small Bellevue, Washington firm that has made subscription junk fees its specialty — turned that fee into a multi-forum campaign that SiriusXM ultimately paid to make go away, while New York’s attorney general independently took apart the company’s cancellation process in court.

Timeline

Date	Event
2023-06-05	Carovillano v. Sirius XM filed in the Southern District of New York (1:23-cv-04723): advertised prices concealed the royalty fee. Press coverage of the complaint floats ~$28B in claimed exposure. 3
2023-06-13	Wave 1 hits AAA: 19,577 arbitration demands (01-23-0002-6406), lead attorney Daniel Hattis — eight days after the class action. 1
6 months
2023-12	NY Attorney General Letitia James sues SiriusXM over its cancel-by-agent-only subscription flow — a separate front, same pressure. 6
2024-02-06	SDNY denies SiriusXM’s motion to dismiss the NY GBL §§ 349/350 claims: a generic “plus fees and taxes” disclaimer doesn’t immunize an undisclosed 21.4% fee 4. Reporting indicates phone-signup plaintiffs also defeated the company’s arbitration push. 5
4 months
2024-06	Parallel class actions filed by the same counsel network: Balmores (W.D. Wash. 2:24-cv-00886) 8 and Woods (San Francisco). 9
5 months
2024-11	NY court rules SiriusXM’s cancellation process violated ROSCA — customers could sign up without an agent but couldn’t cancel without one. 7
8 months
2025-07-16	Wave 2 hits AAA: 11,158 demands (01-25-0003-3668) 1. Days earlier, Keller Postman filed 23,821 Unruh Act demands against Pandora — SiriusXM’s own subsidiary (see sidebar). 2
6 months
2026-01-13	Global settlement. Resolves most remaining mass arbitration claims plus the Carovillano, Burns, Kirkpatrick, Balmores, and Woods class actions. 2
2026-04-01	NY court grants the AG an injunction and accounting on the ROSCA claim. 2
2026-05-20	Both AAA case numbers close on the same day — the settlement, effectuated. 1

One class action survives: Stutsman v. Sirius XM Radio LLC (W.D. Wash. 2:25-cv-01113), which SiriusXM says it will fight. ¹⁰

How the campaign was structured

Two forums, one theory. The SDNY class action and the first AAA wave landed eight days apart. That is not a coincidence; it is a design. Subscribers who signed up by phone had a strong argument they never agreed to arbitrate — they anchored the court track ⁵. Everyone else went to AAA. SiriusXM faced the same allegation on both tracks simultaneously and could not kill either one: the motion to dismiss failed in February 2024, and 19,577 AAA demands carry per-case fees a respondent pays whether or not the claims have merit.

Waves, not a flood. The second AAA filing came two years after the first — 11,158 more demands in July 2025, while settlement pressure from the first wave was presumably maturing. A second wave tells the respondent the pipeline is still open: settle globally, or the demands keep coming.

A state AG as an accidental force multiplier. The New York Attorney General’s cancellation suit was independent, but every ruling — the ROSCA decision in November 2024, the injunction in April 2026 — raised the reputational and regulatory temperature while the fee campaign was pending. A settlement number isn't just the value of the claims — it's also what a company will pay to stop the headlines. Every AG ruling made fighting more publicly expensive, and none of that pressure cost the claimants a dollar.

The endgame.

What it likely cost to play

Public data doesn’t show the settlement amount — SiriusXM calls it immaterial, and against $2.2B+ in quarterly revenue that phrase covers a lot of ground. But the campaign’s inputs are estimable from public fee schedules: acquiring and screening ~70,000 claimants, three years of prosecution across two AAA case numbers and four-plus federal and state courts, and the working capital to carry all of it with recovery uncertain until year three.

This campaign was won by a firm that could fund a three-year, two-front war it might have lost. That is the barrier to entry in one sentence.

Sidebar: the same quarter’s cautionary tale

Eleven days before Wave 2, Keller Postman filed 23,821 AAA demands against Pandora — a SiriusXM subsidiary — alleging its ad targeting used age and sex data in violation of California’s Unruh Act. The claimants had already spent a year litigating just to get into arbitration: an LA Superior Court petition to compel, granted in part in June 2025. On January 28, 2026, a single AAA Process Arbitrator dismissed all of the pending claims, and AAA closed the matter two weeks later. ²

Same respondent family, same forum, same quarter: one campaign ends in a global settlement, the other ends with ~26,000 claims dismissed by one arbitrator in one order. The Process Arbitrator — a role AAA created because of mass arbitration — is now one of the highest-leverage decision points in the category. That asymmetry is the entire risk profile of mass arbitration in miniature. It’s next issue’s story.