The US Supreme Court won't stop a lawsuit accusing the four major music labels of conspiring to fix music prices. The Supreme Court made its decision Monday morning after the labels appealed a lower court's ruling that the case would move forward.

The case is Sony Music Entertainment v. Kevin Starr, though it involves all of the Big Four labels: Sony, Warner Music, EMI, and a unit of Vivendi SA (the company behind Universal Music Group). The original complaint accuses the record labels of colluding to set a minimum price of 70¢ per song when they began selling music online, in addition to the high subscription fees they imposed when starting music services MusicNet and pressplay back in 2001.

The lawsuit was dismissed in 2008 by a federal judge, but an appeals court later reversed the ruling, saying that the plaintiffs had presented enough facts to justify moving forward with the case. The music labels appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the allegations in the complaint weren't sufficient to prove anything.

The case will now proceed to the discovery stage, but is unlikely to go to trial before the end of 2011. A loss could prove expensive to the record labels.