The Music Modernization Act Misses the Mark

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From Variety:

Three pieces of legislation that aim to update the ways that royalties are paid to songwriters and artists — the Music Modernization Act, the CLASSICS Act and the AMP Act — are going before Congress later this year.

. . . .

The Music Modernization Act (“MMA”) is an important piece of copyright legislation with the potential to benefit the music community, most important, songwriters and composers, who may finally receive just compensation for the millions of streams of their work fans enjoy and on which digital music services base their businesses. But the current draft fails to deliver on that promise.

As the MMA moves closer to a vote in Congress, those of us who have refrained from joining the cheering squad have had time to study its details and likely long-term consequences. The more we’ve looked at it, the more concerned we’ve become. While there are a good number of serious issues with the bill, its fundamental flaw is that it completely fails to accomplish one of its most important goals: ensure that all the writers whose music is played on digital music services get paid.

The idea sounds simple enough. The digital music services have agreed to pay for every stream of every song. There are ways to determine whose song is whose. The rate is all set. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that the major music publishers have seized this opportunity to attempt to tighten their tenuous grip on the music publishing business, using the MMA to install themselves as the gatekeeper for tens of millions of dollars in unclaimed royalties from digital music services, and, in effect appointing themselves as the sole judge and jury about who is entitled to be paid, how they will be paid, and even if they will be paid.

The publishers have gone so far as to claim that if the writer of a song doesn’t file a proper claim within 36 months of performance, 100% of the royalties from those streams will instead be paid to the top publishers (and some of their biggest writers) via the world’s largest “black box” of royalties. Really?

The music business is going through an unprecedented period of growth, fragmentation, and democratization. A new generation of writers is looking for new ways to get their music to market, and new business paradigms based on transparency and technology are being developed with and for them. Big music publishers still control a large portion of the business, but a global world of independent writers and publishers is beginning to challenge their dominance.

We won’t go into all the details of the MMA (it’s more than 100 pages long) except to say that the complicated organizational structure it establishes pretty much ensures that a big pile of money will end up in the black box, destined for distribution to the major publishers based on their market share. It is highly unlikely that the tens of thousands of independent self-published and unpublished writers whose music is performed on Spotify and other digital music services will ever get their fair share.

Proponents of the bill claim to have the support of the tens of thousands of music creators. We strongly believe that few, if any, of those writers understood the details of the bill or its implications when they were asked for support.

Link to the rest at Variety