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.
If you’re a recording artists or musician, you have most likely heard some form of this pitch:
“Don’t worry. If you don’t like how your music is used for AI, we can always take it back out later.”
That sounds fair.
The hard part is that, today, it is not that simple. And it’s so not simple, that statement may as well be untrue.
That is why we created the Machine Unlearning Research Hub at MusicTechPolicy.com—to help musicians understand what machine unlearning is, what it can do today, and what it may be able to do tomorrow.
Think of it like baking a cake
Suppose you bake a cake with flour, eggs, butter, milk, and sugar. The eggs make the cake what it is.
Once the cake comes out of the oven, you cannot remove just the eggs. AI training works in much the same way.
When an AI developer “trains” a model (often on illegally acquired recordings as we are seeing in the litigation), it does not simply store copies of recordings in a folder. It changes billions—or even trillions—of internal values based on every recording it has been trained on and extracted from those training tracks or its “training pipeline”. Each recording and the values the AI extracts from the recording helps shape the finished model.
That’s why it knows what you mean when you ask it to play an Eric Clapton solo or a John Bonham drum fill. That is also why taking one recording back out later is so difficult.
Surely, you say, they didn’t build a dataset that cannot be corrected and only gets larger with human personal rights and copyrights? Well, they kind of did. Not that different from Google Street View. There’s a long “Hotel California” tradition with these people.
So what is machine unlearning?
Machine unlearning is a field of research that asks a simple question:
Can an AI system forget what it learned from a particular piece of data without rebuilding the entire model from scratch?
The quick answer today is not very easily, no matter what they tell you. Researchers all over the world are working on that question.
The results are a mixed bag. A cynic—who me?—might say they’re not trying very hard. But some techniques show real promise. Others work only under very limited conditions with largely toy datasets.
For today’s largest music models, there is still no widely accepted way to guarantee that every artifact of one recording—or one artist—has been completely removed.
That does not mean machine unlearning will never work. It means it is still a research problem.
How much can it fix today?
The honest answer is:
Some things. Not everything.
Researchers have developed methods that can reduce a model’s reliance on particular data or make it much less likely to produce certain results. That’s not 100% or zero depending on how you look at it. But it’s better every year and those advances matter.
But reducing influence is not the same thing as proving that a recording has been fully removed from a commercial AI model. For musicians, that difference is obviously important.
Will it get better?
Almost certainly.
Machine unlearning is receiving significant attention from universities, technology companies, and governments. Why? Well, for one thing there are countries that have the “right to be forgotten” that Google fought so hard against in Europe and especially Germany. There’s also other privacy laws that all of the AI models are essentially out of compliance with, so it’s only a matter of time until there’s a real effort to do something about it.
Five years from now, today’s methods will almost certainly look primitive. Ten years from now, the tools may be far better still. But no one can honestly promise today that future improvements will solve every problem created by yesterday’s training.
That is why decisions made now still matter. Let’s be honest, the best way to stay out of AI is to never be included in AI.
What does this mean if someone wants to license your music?
Ask yourself one simple question:
If I change my mind in three years, how will my music come back out?
Do not settle for vague promises.
Ask specific questions.
Will my recordings be kept in a separate training set?
Can they be removed without rebuilding the model?
What machine unlearning process will be used?
Has that process been independently tested?
How will you prove my music was removed?
What happens if the technology cannot fully remove it?
Who pays to remove it?
If the company cannot answer those questions today, it is worth understanding that they are asking you to rely on technology that may not yet exist in the form they hope it will. Or as Blanche Dubois said in Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.” Feel good yet?
That does not necessarily mean you should refuse every AI license.
It does mean you should know exactly what risk you are accepting.
This is why we built the Machine Unlearning Research Hub
Machine unlearning is moving quickly, and new research papers appear almost every week. Some represent genuine breakthroughs, others improve only narrow parts of the problem.
Our goal is not to tell musicians what decision to make. Our goal is to help musicians make informed decisions based on the best available evidence. If someone asks you to license your music for AI, you deserve to know one thing before you sign:
Can they realistically give it back if you ask?
Today, that question deserves a careful answer—not a marketing slogan. That is what the Machine Unlearning Research Hub is here to explore.
For millions of soccer fans, attending a FIFA World Cup match is a dream. But for a growing number of ticket buyers, that dream has turned into a costly nightmare—and now the state of Texas is getting involved.
The Problem
It should come as a shock to no one that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a formal investigation into StubHub over the massive number of fan complaints tied to 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket purchases. The only surprise in Paxton’s investigation is that it’s just him. Like so many other unfortunate ticket buyers before them, fans report that their tickets were either never delivered, canceled at the last minute, or were significantly inferior to what they originally paid for.
There is a fan class action case pending in New York federal court, but…The proposed class action filed by World Cup fans in the Southern District of New York will likely face an important threshold procedural issue before the merits are ever reached. As readers will recall from our coverage of the Kaiser v. StubHub case (also in SDNY), one issue to watch is whether StubHub seeks to enforce its online arbitration agreement and class-action waiver. Consumer platforms routinely invoke arbitration clauses to move disputes out of court and into individual proceedings, and StubHub may well attempt the same strategy here.
Whatever the outcome of the class action and StubHub’s challenges, that procedural defense is unavailable against a state enforcement action. A lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General under state consumer protection laws proceeds in court regardless of private arbitration agreements, potentially allowing public discovery, broader injunctive relief, and judicial scrutiny that individual consumer claims might never receive. This procedural distinction helps explain why state attorney general investigations can play a uniquely important role in policing mass-market online platforms, even when private class actions are already pending. And remember, Paxton has gotten over $1 billion from each of Google and Meta on privacy cases.
At the heart of Paxton’s investigation is speculative ticketing aka “ghost tickets” — where sellers list tickets they don’t actually possess, collect payment, and then cancel orders when they can’t deliver or cover their promise to deliver tickets. This seedy practice is not new to readers and we’ve been harping on it for years. According to Paxton’s press release, consumer complaints suggest this isn’t an isolated issue but a broader, systemic pattern. Ya think?
“In many cases, attending a World Cup match is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Paxton said. “If StubHub is ghost ticketing Texans out of that experience, my office will use every tool available to hold them accountable and help fans who have been wronged.”
One Fan’s Story
Edgar Correa’s wife wanted to make his World Cup dream come true. She purchased tickets through StubHub on June 11 for the Bosnia-Switzerland match at Los Angeles Stadium on June 18. The couple booked a hotel, paid for parking, and Edgar took the day off work.
Then came the devastating message from StubHub: “Unfortunately, your order was not processed. This means the transaction was not completed and, therefore, no tickets were reserved for you.”
After scrambling, Correa managed to find replacement tickets directly through FIFA’s official platform—but they cost more and placed him at the very top of the stadium, far from the seats he’d originally paid for.
The Finger-Pointing
StubHub has blamed the cancellations on “transfer problems” tied to FIFA’s ticketing platform, stating that “the issues fans have experienced at this World Cup are largely due to performance failures in the event organizer’s own ticketing infrastructure, which has caused transfer errors across all resale platforms.”
FIFA isn’t having it. A spokesperson fired back: “The official FIFA ticketing platform for the FIFA World Cup 2026 operates reliably and at scale, as demonstrated by the more than 4.6 million spectators who have attended matches to date, with tickets purchased, delivered, resold, transferred, and successfully validated through FIFA systems.” FIFA explicitly rejected any suggestion that third-party platform failures are the result of its infrastructure.
The Industry Pushback
Paxton isn’t the only one sounding the alarm. On June 18—just days into the tournament—the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) and Fan Alliance sent a joint letter to congressional leadership demanding a federal ban on speculative ticket sales. The letter, signed by NIVA Executive Director (and ARS panelist) Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance Executive Director Donald Cohen, includes nearly two dozen exhibits documenting first-hand fan accounts of ghost ticketing (another name for spec tickets) from just the first week of the World Cup.
The groups have been warning about this exact scenario for years. As they wrote: “We warned that consumers would purchase tickets that did not exist. We warned that families would travel thousands of miles only to discover their tickets could not be delivered. We warned that refunds would not make consumers whole after airfare, hotels, rental cars, parking, and other travel expenses. Unfortunately, every one of those warnings has become a reality on the world’s biggest sporting stage.”
Their proposed fix is aggressive. They’re asking Congress to ban ghost ticketing outright, impose price gouging caps on resale, levy fines of at least $10,000 per listing per day, and require platforms like StubHub to disclose data on fulfillment rates, refunds, and consumer complaints—information the platforms have repeatedly declined to make public.
Notably, the letter takes direct aim at the TICKET Act currently before Congress, arguing it would still permit the very ghost ticketing that’s victimizing fans right now. The groups point to states like Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Connecticut, and Nevada, which have already banned speculative sales and closed the loopholes that let resellers rebrand the practice as “concierge” or “ticket procurement” services (which also confused Colorado Governor Jared Polis when he vetoed a ban on spec ticking).
The letter also makes a point that often gets lost in the World Cup headlines: this same consumer harm plays out every day at independent venues, theaters, and comedy clubs across the country. Unlike FIFA or the NFL, these small businesses can’t absorb the reputational damage when fans blame the venue for a scalper’s fraud.
The Securities Question
One open question: StubHub is now a publicly traded company (NYSE: STUB) following its September 2025 IPO. If ghost ticketing cancellations represent a material volume of failed transactions—and the lawsuits and state investigations suggest they might—does StubHub face disclosure obligations around the scope of unfulfilled orders, pending litigation exposure, and potential regulatory liability? At least one investor rights firm has already flagged a lead plaintiff deadline tied to StubHub’s IPO disclosures, suggesting the securities angle may not be far behind the consumer protection one.
What You Can Do
If you purchased World Cup tickets through StubHub and didn’t receive them—or received tickets significantly different from what you paid for—the Texas Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division is encouraging you to file a complaint.
FIFA’s own FAQ is blunt: for any ticket sold through another platform, buyers must contact that platform directly. FIFA cannot access or manage those tickets. The organization recommends buying tickets only through its official site. Well, it’s a little late for that.
The Takeaway
The 2026 World Cup has been a spectacular global event, but the secondary ticket market has exposed serious consumer protection gaps. Whether this is a case of ghost ticketing, platform infrastructure failures, or something in between, one thing is clear: fans are paying the price. With a state attorney general now on the case, StubHub may soon face real accountability for the broken promises left in its wake.
The Trichordist 
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