The Artist Rights Symposium V is coming on October 19 at Tweed Recording in Athens, GA hosted by the University of Georgia Terry College of Business Music Certificate Program and the School of Policy and International Affairs, and the Artist Rights Institute. More about the Symposium here and register on Eventbrite here.
We’ll be posting panel overviews to introduce you to the speakers, starting with the ticketing panel. From nonexistent World Cup tickets to a growing state-by-state push for resale reform, the ticketing debate is moving quickly. “Ghost Busters: How Fans, Artists, and Venues Are Fighting Back Against Speculative Tickets” will examine what artists, venues and lawmakers can do about ghost tickets, predatory resale and a secondary market increasingly disconnected from the artists who create the event.
The panel begins at 11:30 a.m. on October 19 at Tweed Recording with these experts:
Randy Nichols, a board member of the National Independent Talent Organization, leads NITO research and policy efforts addressing predatory resale practices. A longtime artist manager and entrepreneur, his advocacy draws on two decades of experience in the live-music business.
Jay Gilbert, co-founder of Label Logic and co-host of Your Morning Coffee, brings decades of music-industry experience, including executive roles with Universal, Sony and Warner and marketing campaigns for artists ranging from Nirvana and The Police to Bob Marley and Johnny Cash.
Moderating is Mala Sharma, co-founder and president of Georgia Music Partners, whose career spans record labels, artist management, entertainment banking, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and public policy.
The conversation: Who should control a ticket after it goes on sale—and how do we stop people from selling tickets they never owned in the first place?
In this short video, Gwendolyn Seale and Artist Rights Institute Director Chris Castle preview “The 39 Steps,” a Symposium V panel asking whether Section 115’s complex streaming mechanical formula should give way to a fixed per-stream penny rate with a COLA.
Gwen joins fellow attorneys Tim Kappel and Shannon Sorensen—all three represent clients before the Copyright Royalty Board in Phonorecords V. ARI Director and UGA professor David C. Lowery moderates. David teaches at the Terry College of Business Music Certificate program. He led the class action against Spotify over nonpayment of streaming mechanical royalties and is a class representative in the Isbell v. Suno class action.
Join us October 19, 2026, at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, for Artist Rights Symposium V hosted by Terry College of Business and the UGA School of Policy and International Affairs.
We’re pleased to announce that the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs has joined the Artist Rights Institute and UGA’s Music Business Certificate Program at Terry College as a sponsor of the fifth annual Artist Rights Symposium, October 19, 2026, in Athens, Georgia.
The addition of SPIA is especially timely. This year’s Symposium reaches beyond traditional music-industry issues to examine the broader public-policy consequences of artificial intelligence—from the massive data centers, energy infrastructure, and local communities supporting AI development to the legal and policy questions surrounding artist consent, identity, compensation, and the use of creative work.
Bringing together music business, law, public policy, artists, advocates, and policymakers is exactly what this moment requires.
Artist Rights Symposium V October 19, 2026 — Athens, Georgia Speakers and additional program details coming soon.
The American Music Fairness Act is still alive in the 119th Congress in the post-Labor Day political season, and with Congress heading toward the final stretch of the year, it is worth remembering both what the bill actually does and why it matters.
The basic proposition behind AMFA is remarkably simple: when terrestrial radio uses a sound recording to make money, the people who made the recording should be paid. That is not currently the law in the United States, and that’s what the #I Respect Music campaign is all about.
Songwriters and music publishers receive public-performance royalties when AM/FM radio plays a song. But the recording artists, background singers, session musicians and owners of the sound recording receive nothing for the terrestrial performance of that recording. Digital radio services, by contrast, already pay sound-recording performance royalties.
AMFA—S. 326 in the Senate and H.R. 861 in the House—would finally close that anomaly by extending the Section 106(6) sound-recording performance right to terrestrial audio transmissions and bringing AM/FM broadcasts within the Section 114 statutory licensing system.
One of the more persistent arguments against AMFA is that a new royalty would threaten small and community broadcasters. Congress has addressed that concern rather directly.
Under S. 326, a qualifying station with less than $100,000 in annual revenue would pay $10 per year. Qualifying public broadcasters with revenues between $100,000 and $1.5 million would pay $100 per year, while other qualifying stations in that range would pay $500. Those protections are limited to genuinely smaller operations; among other requirements, the station’s owner and affiliated entities must have aggregate revenues below $10 million. Let’s be real; that’s a fair deal for small broadcasters, come on.
For everyone else, the Copyright Royalty Judges would establish the rate. And Congress expressly tells the judges that they can consider radio’s much-invoked “exposure” value when determining that rate. (I’m so sure they’ll net out the indie payments, but hush my mouth.)
In other words, “radio promotes records” is not ignored by AMFA. It becomes an economic proposition that can be tested in an actual rate-setting proceeding rather than a vague slogan chanted by NAB lobbyists in sack cloth and ashes justifying a permanent entitlement for large broadcasters to use recordings for free.
There is another important feature of AMFA that deserves considerably more attention. The bill plugs a potential direct-licensing loophole. If a copyright owner directly licenses transmissions that otherwise could have been made under the Section 114 statutory license, the broadcaster doesn’t get to use that deal to contract the performers out of their statutory share. The transmitting entity must pay 50 percent of the applicable direct-license royalties to SoundExchange (the collective Congress designated to distribute Section 114 royalties), which then distributes the money according to the statutory performer allocations.
That protection is important. It means AMFA isn’t merely creating another revenue stream payable to record companies with the hope that something eventually trickles through an artist’s recording agreement around recoupment in the royalty waterfall. The legislation deliberately preserves a statutory payment path for featured and nonfeatured performers.
That’s an important piece of artist protection and one of the better features of the bill.
The reality is that AMFA is not sitting on the President’s desk. Neither chamber has reported the bill so far, and that’s the reality in the cold light of dawn. But— look at the Senate sponsorship.
S. 326 is led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and now has Thom Tillis (R-NC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) aboard. That is a 3–3 Republican/Democratic lineup, and importantly, Tillis chairs the Senate Judiciary Intellectual Property Subcommittee while Schiff is its ranking member.
That’s only six senators including the sponsor, so this is certainly not a 60-vote whip count. But six names don’t tell the whole story. Having the chairman and ranking member of the relevant subcommittee supporting the legislation is rather different from having six random cosponsors.
The Senate also did something important in December: it held an actual IP Subcommittee hearing on terrestrial performance rights, with Gene Simmons and SoundExchange President Michael Huppe making the case for performers and broadcasters presenting the opposing view. And when Gene Simmons makes the case before Congress (“the word ‘if’ is for losers….”) and in his Washington Post op-ed, that’s a sight to behold and is must-see TV if you haven’t watched it.
AMFA support in the House of Representatives is also bipartisan. H.R. 861 is sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), with support that crosses the aisle, including our long-time supporters Jerry Nadler and Ted Lieu. The House bill has accumulated additional cosponsors since introduction, although it likewise has not yet been reported from Judiciary.
So call the whip count what it is: not enough yet, but unusually well positioned institutionally for a music bill that hasn’t moved through committee. And let’s be clear—fighting the National Association of Broadcasters is tough work, right up there with the Augean Stables and Sisyphus. Although closer to the Stables in our opinion.
That brings us to the calendar. There isn’t much legislative runway remaining in the 119th Congress, and AMFA still faces formidable opposition from the broadcast lobby. A conventional committee-to-floor path is getting increasingly difficult. But Congress will return after the November elections, and that is where things could get interesting before January 3, 2027 when unpasted bills die.
Music legislation has a history of moving when bipartisan agreement finally intersects with a legislative vehicle. The Music Modernization Act itself ultimately became a package containing several pieces of music legislation and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
AMFA now has something it did not have at the beginning of this Congress: a Senate hearing, bipartisan support from the leadership of the relevant IP subcommittee, bipartisan sponsorship in both chambers, and a legislative record establishing both the case for paying performers and the protections afforded small broadcasters.
While that doesn’t guarantee anything, it does make AMFA a plausible candidate for a lame-duck legislative vehicle if the right copyright, intellectual-property or broader year-end package starts moving. Stranger things have happened.
And this is one of those issues where Congress has been “studying” the problem for a very long time. As SoundExchange CEO Mike Huppe reminded the Senate last December, the Senate Judiciary Committee actually reported the predecessor Performance Rights Act in 2009. It never reached the floor.
Seventeen years later, the underlying inequity is still the law: American radio broadcasters can build a commercial business around recorded performances without paying the performers for those performances. Digital services pay. Broadcasters in most other developed music markets pay. American terrestrial radio does not. Artists still die of exposure.
The American Music Fairness Act would finally change that.
Six Senate sponsors isn’t 60 votes. But with Blackburn, Tillis, Hagerty, Padilla, Booker and Schiff already aboard—and Tillis and Schiff occupying the two key positions on the IP Subcommittee—there may be enough bipartisan infrastructure here to keep watching very closely as Congress heads toward the lame duck.
Sometimes the last few weeks of a Congress are when supporters of legislation that has been waiting years finally ride Justice across the finish line.
The Artist Rights Institute and the University of Georgia School of Public Policy and International Affairs are pleased to announce Artist Rights Symposium V, to be held October 19, 2026, in Athens, Georgia at the School of Public Policy.
The fifth annual symposium will bring together artists, songwriters, musicians, academics, lawyers, policymakers, and other voices for a day of candid discussion about the rapidly changing legal, technological, and economic issues affecting creators.
The symposium will be moderated by David Lowery, Principal Lecturer in the Music Business Program at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and co-founder of the Artist Rights Institute. As in previous years, the emphasis will be on hearing directly from the people whose livelihoods and creative work are affected by these changes.
Panels and speakers will be announced soon.
For now, save the date: October 19, 2026 — Athens, Georgia.
As part of our series highlighting selected objections to the NMPA-backed Phonorecords V Subpart B settlement, we turn to the filing of the Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL), representing approximately 4,000 composers, lyricists, songwriters, and music copyright owners. SCL asks the Copyright Royalty Judges to reject the proposed settlement, arguing that it locks in an artificially low mechanical royalty base rather than genuinely preserving creators’ purchasing power.
SCL focuses particularly on what it calls the missing inflation of 2021 and 2022. Its objection argues that carrying forward the 12¢ benchmark fails to restore those unusually inflationary years and could perpetuate the resulting shortfall through every subsequent COLA adjustment. SCL objects that the NMPA settlement carries the Phonorecords IV formula into Phonorecords V in a way that effectively creates a new frozen mechanical. Rather than carrying forward the actual inflation-adjusted 2027 penny rate (for example), the settlement retains 12¢ as the benchmark, perpetuating the very rate-freeze problem Phonorecords IV’s COLA was intended to prevent.
SCL proposes instead a physical and permanent-download rate of approximately 15.6¢ beginning in 2028, followed by annual CPI adjustments which would take into account the 2021 and 2022 rates that the PR IV rates did not take into account in coming up with the 12¢ rate.
The filing also returns to a familiar issue from Phonorecords IV: vertical integration among the parties negotiating the settlement. SCL invokes the Judges’ own earlier warning that relationships linking major publishers and record labels can create inherent conflicts requiring scrutiny before a private agreement is transformed into rates binding the entire industry.
SCL also challenges the continued 24¢ ringtone rate, raises concerns about bundling, and disputes the proposition that agreement among major industry organizations necessarily represents a consensus of the individual creators whose statutory royalties will be determined.
Perhaps the filing’s central point is the simplest: an annual inflation adjustment cannot repair an incorrectly low starting point. SCL asks the Judges to reject the settlement and encourage a new negotiation that includes the views of independent creator organizations before rates are fixed for 2028–2032.
Continuing our series highlighting objections to the proposed Phonorecords V settlement for mechanical royalties on physical and permanent downloads, our friends Helienne Lindvall, David Lowery, and Blake Morgan focus on a deceptively simple question: What is the record that allows the Copyright Royalty Judges to conclude this settlement is reasonable? Our friends do not argue that settlement is improper—or even necessarily that this settlement is unreasonable. Instead, they argue that Congress assigned the Judges, not the negotiating parties, responsibility for determining whether a private agreement provides a reasonable basis for rates imposed industry-wide. There’s just no record other than the NMPA’s settlement itself.
The comment also questions carrying the 12¢ Phonorecords IV benchmark forward through another five-year rate period simply because it remains indexed for inflation. CPI preserves the real value of the existing benchmark; it does not establish that the benchmark remains reasonable for 2028–2032. With vertically integrated companies operating on both sides of the “settlement”, the commenters argue that the missing economic record matters even more.
It’s that time again. It’s no secret that we are not fans of the NMPA’s “quick and cheap” settlement on the statutory mechanicl license for physical and downloads which in its own way is essentially “take this eat that” freeze with no explanation that just extends the rates we fought for in the last rate setting. (David, Helienne and Blake filed a joint comment that we’ll get to posting in coming days.). Hard as it may be to believe, there’s no real record to support the NMPA settlement aside from “quick and cheap” and “we’re big.” Don’t think that that one appears in the rules anywhere.
But it turns out we are far from being the only ones who managed to achieve escape velocity from the influence of NMPA. Today we’re highlighting another submission in the Phonorecords V Subpart B proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Board.
In these comments, Kevin M. Casini and Kaila C. Coleman argue that the proposed settlement preserves inflation adjustments but does not reconsider whether the underlying 12¢ statutory mechanical royalty remains an appropriate benchmark for the 2028–2032 rate period. They contend that changes in the music marketplace—including the resurgence of vinyl, increased catalog values, and the continuing importance of physical formats for many independent writers—warrant closer examination.
One passage that stood out:
“The Board’s obligation extends beyond determining whether a proposed settlement has support among major industry participants. The Board must determine whether the resulting rates are fair, reasonable, and consistent with the objectives of the Copyright Act.”
As always, we’re featuring these comments to encourage readers to review the arguments being presented to the Copyright Royalty Judges.
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