Warner Music, Madonna’s record company, yesterday received a $110 million (£54.9 million) settlement from Bertelsmann, a day after Edgar Bronfman, Warner’s chief executive, was sued for $100 million by a man who claimed that he helped him to buy the music company in the first place.

The payout by Bertelsmann takes its total payments to $270 million, and dates back to a short-lived decison by the German group to back the file-sharing website Napster, which was closed down in 2002 amid widespread copyright violations.

Warner will not keep all the money, sharing some of it with artists. However, it will be a welcome boost to a company suffering in a weak US market, which began the year sharply down amid collapsing CD sales.

Bertelsmann’s payment came after payouts of $60 million to Vivendi’s Universal Music and of an estimated $100 million to EMI. It has not admitted liability in any of the cases. It is understood that Sony also has an outstanding unsettled claim.

Separately, Richard Snyder, a former chief executive of Simon & Schuster, the publisher, issued a $100 million lawsuit against Mr Bronfman, claiming that he had suggested to the media mogul that they try to buy Warner Music from Time Warner, then its parent, in 2004, and that Mr Bronfman had verbally promised a “fair and equitable distribution” of their success.

Mr Snyder, who had an office at Mr Bronfman’s private equity firm Lexa Partners, accused the Warner Music chief of reneging on the alleged agreement because he was “fearful of admitting to anyone — even himself — that he was incapable of attaining this level of success on his own”.

Orin Snyder, Mr Bronfman’s laywer, said that the claim for damages would be contested, adding: “These claims are absolute fiction. Simply put, Dick Snyder did not work on the Warner Music Group transaction and there was never an agreement to compensate him for anything.”

Mr Snyder ran Simon & Schuster for 20 years before being dismissed in 1994 by Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, its parent; he later tried and failed to rescue the publisher Golden Books.

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