Author: Trichordist

Songwriters Are Being Asked to Accept Something We’ve Never Seen Before

The freeze is back.  

The first settlement in the Phonorecords V mechanical royalty proceeding is now on file (see below). A settlement is supposed to result from a “voluntary negotiation,” so the document raises a simple question: when exactly did the negotiation happen?

78742Download

The parties describe “conversations” with other participants. Maybe there were conversations. But conversations are not the same thing as negotiation. A proposal presented as essentially a finished product, with little or no opportunity to influence its terms, is notification—not negotiation.

The Parties have had settlement conversations regarding the so-called Subpart B rates and terms with the other copyright owner Participants in the Proceeding (Songwriters Guild of America, World Collections, Inc., Eight Mile Music Companies, and George Johnson), who declined to join this settlement.

That distinction is crucial because this settlement would establish the statutory mechanical royalty rate for physical records and permanent downloads starting in 2028 through 2032.  Those rates affect every songwriter, including those ex-US songwriters whose songs are exploited in the US.  According to sources overseas, ex-US songwriter groups were not consulted, although it is customary for NMPA and NSAI to not engage with them even though they are a significant group (other than major mostly English language songwriters who are represented in the US by major publishers).

This means that it is likely that an alternative proposal or several alternative proposals will come to the Copyright Royalty Board in coming days from those who were not included in the NMPA’s settlement.  As the settlement itself anticipates, whatever deal the Judges end up adopting will be published as a tentative ruling allowing public comment, but that’s down the line.  Watch this space or the CRB website for Phonorecords V for more on deadlines, etc., if you want to comment.

To our knowledge, this is also the first time we’ve seen multiple competing settlements in a CRB phonorecords proceeding. Multiple settlements are common in webcasting and other CRB cases because different categories of music users—commercial broadcasters, NPR, college radio, religious broadcasters, and others—often negotiate different deals tailored to their own services. Mechanical royalty proceedings have traditionally been different. Everyone is negotiating one statutory rate that applies across the board divided into two broad categories by music user: labels (who pay for physical and downloads), and digital services like Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta (who pay for streaming mechanicals and control the global streaming market and some of which largely control AI models so lead the charge on AI theft for training).

The settlement itself also leaves some obvious questions unanswered.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing every aspect of music licensing, yet AI is not mentioned at all in the settlement. If downloads or streaming services increasingly contain AI-generated tracks that may not even qualify for copyright protection, should those recordings receive statutory licenses or royalties at all? The Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works lacking sufficient human authorship cannot be registered for copyright to enjoy the protections of the Copyright Act, and the statutory license is part of the Copyright Act. If that principle eventually affects downloads or streaming (which we think it does right now), it is difficult to imagine that it will never influence the economics of physical or download mechanical royalties as well. That issue received no attention in the NMPA’s settlement.

Then there is another provision that deserves far more discussion.

The settlement continues the existing CPI adjustment mechanism that songwriter’s fought for in the last rate setting that increased the mechanical rate from the frozen 9.1¢ proposed by the NMPA and major labels to 12¢ plus a “Cost of Living Adjustment” (or “COLA”) thanks to the Judges rejection of the extended freeze. In other words, they did the opposite of what we recently suggested in Don’t Freeze Mechanicals Again.

Adopting a 12¢ base rate makes no sense—that’s the same rate as the Judges took as the base rate for the first year of the five year rate period starting in 2023 and then applied the COLA to that rate in subsequent years.  Of course, that 12¢ rate has been eroded by inflation every year and is now worth about 10¢ without the COLA, but songwriters negotiated and received that COLA which sustained the value of the rate. That’s how we got from 12¢ in 2023 to the current 13.1¢ rate in 2026 that will probably increase again for 2027 (our guess is somewhere in the 13.4¢ to 13.6¢ range).  Why wouldn’t you just take that highest rate achieved during the last year of the Phonorecords IV period (2027) and start applying the COLA to that in the first year of the Phonorecords V period (2028)?  Rather than go back to the arbitrary 12¢ reference rate? Huh?

On its first glance, adopting a COLA for the new rates sounds reasonable because it protects songwriters against inflation. But the formula contains no floor preventing the statutory rate from declining if cumulative CPI were ever to fall.

Deflation may be unlikely. That’s not the concern.  But the COLA could still cause rates to decline. All that has to happen is that inflation doesn’t rise at the same rate or greater from one year to the next and then the COLA-adjusted statutory rate will decline.

The point is that, for what may be the first time in the history of the statutory rate and certainly since the modern Copyright Act took effect in 1978, songwriters are being asked to accept a statutory mechanical royalty structure under which the minimum statutory rate could actually move backward, and very likely will decline.

A simple solution exists. The regulation could easily provide that each year’s rate is the greater of (1) the COLA-adjusted calculation or (2) the prior year’s rate. That would preserve the existing inflation formula while ensuring the statutory royalty never declines.

Why wasn’t that included?  Or better yet, why wasn’t an actual value based increase included since we are still digging out of two prior freezes of the statutory rate one from 1909-1978 when the rate froze at 2¢ and the other from 2006-2022 when the rate froze at 9.1¢.

That’s a fair question.

So is another one.

If we’re going to lock in the statutory mechanical royalty through 2032, shouldn’t there have been a meaningful discussion—not just among the settling parties, but across the songwriting community—about AI, future valuation, whether there should be a statutory minimum for streaming and whether the statutory minimum itself should ever be permitted to decrease?

Those conversations are coming. The only question is whether they should have happened before the settlement was filed instead of afterward.  We had hoped for a longer table with more voices.  Whether that happens remains to be seen.

USCO Mechanical Rates -w- SupplementDownload
by Trichordist

StubHub’s FIFA Ticket Debacle Is Different This Time

For years, critics of the secondary ticketing industry (including us) have warned about the dangers of speculative ticket sales, hidden fees, and platforms that profit whether fans ultimately get through the gate or not. Those warnings were often dismissed as the complaints of disgruntled consumers.

The FIFA World Cup ticket controversy suggests those critics may have been right all along. As reported in Business Insider:

Countless World Cup fans are discovering that their tickets have gone poof, and they’re left scrambling to decide whether to buy new, pricier ones or simply give up on their World Cup dreams. They’re asking themselves how this could happen, since many people don’t realize it’s even a possibility.

The answer lies in the peculiar structure of secondary ticket marketplaces. Sites such as StubHub don’t actually sell tickets, much like eBay or Facebook Marketplace, they just connect buyers and sellers. This setup relies on sellers to come through with the tickets they say they have, essentially rendering it an honor system. Companies often don’t require sellers to upload their tickets immediately or provide proof of purchase. Many platforms give sellers until the day of the event to hand over the tickets.

It’s impossible to know the explanation for each individual situation, but one potential culprit is speculative ticketing, which I coined “ghost ticketing” last year. In these scenarios, resellers list tickets on StubHub or SeatGeek that they don’t yet have, hoping they’ll eventually secure them (for a lower price than they offered) and send them along.

FIFA warns fans about such practices:

You can transfer your tickets using the Ticket Transfer feature on the FIFA Resale/Exchange Marketplace. The marketplace is accessible via FIFA.com/tickets.

Please note: Transferring tickets to third-party platforms or accounts is discouraged as it may result in issues, including the inability to cancel or accept transfers. To ensure a secure and valid transfer process, please use the Ticket Transfer feature between FIFA accounts.

Fans reportedly purchased World Cup tickets through StubHub, booked flights, hotels, and vacations around those purchases, only to discover that tickets never arrived, could not be transferred, or could not be honored. In many cases, the offered remedy was a refund.

Business Insider reports that:

A SeatGeek spokesperson said in an email that [a fan’s] letdown “fell short” of the experience the company aims to provide and said they’d apologized to him and were working on a resolution. “We continue to invest significant resources in monitoring World Cup orders and supporting fans attending matches,” they said.

But a refund is not a remedy when the one-time event is over. An “apology” maybe very Internet (“we said we were sorry [for fill in the blank obvious scummy and shady behavior]”) but it ain’t going to cut it.

A World Cup match is not a toaster. Consumers are not merely purchasing a product; they are purchasing an experience tied to a specific place and time. Once the match is over, no amount of reimbursement can recreate the opportunity, no apologies will make the fan whole.

The deeper problem is that these incidents expose the fundamental flaw in speculative ticketing. In many cases, tickets appear—to be more fair than they deserve— to have been offered for sale before sellers possessed transferable inventory or before they could demonstrate a present ability to deliver what they were selling. Consumers were effectively asked to assume the risk that the ticket would eventually materialize. This kind of thing is often called “fraud” in the trade.

Imagine a securities market where brokers could freely sell commodities they did not possess and buyers discovered on settlement day that the shares or options never existed. Regulators would never tolerate such a system. Yet in secondary ticketing markets, similar concerns have persisted for years and nobody has gone to jail.

Longtime critics of the speculative ticketing industry may experience a sense of déjà vu.

As recently as 2024, plaintiffs in Kaiser v. StubHub advanced allegations that sound remarkably familiar: tickets to Hotspurs game allegedly offered for sale that sellers did not possess, consumers induced to purchase based on representations about availability, and a platform collecting fees while bearing relatively little delivery risk. The complaint included civil RICO allegations before being referred to arbitration, meaning many of the underlying claims were ruled on in private (secret) arbitration and never tested through a public merits determination.

Kaiser v stubhubDownload

The significance of Kaiser is not whether every allegation was ultimately proven. The significance is that the core complaints sound strikingly similar to those now emerging from the FIFA World Cup controversy. If the allegations prove accurate, critics will understandably ask why the same concerns appear to be resurfacing only two years later on a much larger stage.

Another uncomfortable question concerns StubHub’s longstanding reliance on mandatory arbitration clauses and class-action waivers contained in its consumer terms of service. Historically, those provisions have helped channel disputes into private proceedings, limiting public discovery and reducing the risk of large-scale class litigation. Indeed, in Kaiser, the court referred even the plaintiffs’ civil RICO claims to arbitration—a result that many consumer advocates viewed as troubling public policy because allegations involving potentially systemic marketplace practices were removed from public judicial scrutiny.

It must be said that StubHub is hardly alone in trying to stretch consumer arbitration provisions beyond what most consumers would reasonably expect. Disney drew national criticism when it initially sought to invoke a Disney+ arbitration clause in a wrongful-death case arising from an allergic-reaction death at Disney Springs. The Happiest Place on Earth later backed down, but the episode illustrates the same broader problem: companies increasingly treat arbitration clauses as all-purpose liability shields, even when the dispute bears little resemblance to the ordinary consumer transaction that supposedly created consent.

The FIFA controversy may test the limits of that strategy. When alleged consumer harm spans multiple countries, major sporting events, and potentially thousands of affected purchasers, the practical, political, and regulatory pressures become much harder to contain through private arbitration. More importantly, arbitration clauses do not bind government regulators. A consumer may be forced into arbitration, but the FTC is not. Nor are state attorneys general, foreign regulators, or other enforcement authorities. In that sense, arbitration may reduce private litigation exposure, but it provides little protection against the type of regulatory scrutiny that often follows high-profile consumer failures.

The larger the FIFA controversy becomes, the less likely it is that StubHub can resolve it behind closed doors. Plus, it makes America look bad and we can think of at least one person who might get really pissed about that.

The FIFA controversy is also notable because the underlying conduct is not universally accepted as a legitimate market practice. In the United Kingdom, the unauthorized resale of football tickets is heavily restricted and, in many circumstances, prohibited outside approved channels established by clubs and governing bodies. That issue surfaced in Kaiser, where plaintiffs alleged sales occurring outside authorized distribution systems and when the plaintiff showed up at Hotspurs World, it became apparent that the plaintiff was the only one not in on the joke. In other words, at least some jurisdictions have already concluded that unrestricted secondary-market sales of football tickets create risks significant enough to warrant legal restrictions.

The timing could hardly be worse for StubHub.

The company recently resolved an FTC enforcement action involving allegedly deceptive pricing practices and so-called “junk fees.” The FTC accused StubHub of using drip-pricing tactics that advertised one price while revealing mandatory fees later in the purchasing process. The resulting settlement required changes to pricing disclosures and a $10 million payment.

But hidden fees were only part of the story.

The FTC’s broader rulemaking record also discussed speculative ticketing as a potentially deceptive practice under the same rule. In fact, commenters specifically raised concerns that platforms were facilitating the sale of tickets that sellers did not actually possess or could not yet transfer. The Commission cited those concerns in its rulemaking discussion, recognizing that speculative ticketing may present consumer-protection issues distinct from hidden fees alone. Numerous states have outlawed speculative ticketing outright, concluding that selling tickets you do not possess is not innovation—it’s such serious consumer harm they outlaw the practice.

That point deserves emphasis. Critics of speculative ticketing were not simply complaining on social media or filing isolated lawsuits. They participated in the federal rulemaking process itself. The concerns raised in litigation such as Kaiser and in comments submitted to the FTC were sufficiently significant that the Commission expressly addressed them when adopting its junk-fee framework. The FIFA controversy therefore does not emerge from nowhere. It arrives against a backdrop of years of consumer complaints, litigation, regulatory comments, and public warnings that the industry has largely resisted.

If a platform represents inventory as available when the seller lacks the present ability to transfer or deliver it, the issue extends beyond pricing disclosures and into the integrity of the marketplace itself. That distinction is significant because it supports expansion of available legal prosecutions.

A civil RICO plaintiff would likely argue that repeated electronic communications marketing unavailable or non-transferable tickets constitute a pattern of wire fraud. And that puts you squarely in racketeering land. Whether such a claim could succeed would depend heavily on evidence of knowledge, intent, and the scale of the conduct. But the FIFA controversy inevitably invites the question raised in Kaiser: at what point does a recurring business practice stop looking like isolated misconduct and start looking systemic?

No one should assume that a criminal RICO case is around the corner. Federal prosecutors would need far stronger evidence and proof of knowing participation in criminal conduct. Yet once allegations involve recurring speculative inventory, consumer deception, electronic communications, and a potentially nationwide pattern of conduct, the discussion inevitably broadens from customer service to compliance and governance. The FTC has been partway down this path before with StubHub—while FTC can’t bring a criminal prosecution, it’s a short stop to a Department of Justice referral, Especially if you know who gets involved.

And that is what makes this episode different.

For years, StubHub could treat these controversies as disputes with unhappy customers. Today, StubHub is a public company. It has benefited from access to public capital markets and the confidence of public investors. With that status comes heightened expectations regarding compliance systems, risk management, internal controls, and regulatory oversight.

Angry fans are one thing. Invited guests in our country are another thing entirely, as are regulators, institutional investors, securities lawyers, and the SEC.

The problem for StubHub is not merely that critics predicted these issues. The problem is that critics raised them in court, raised them before federal regulators, and saw those concerns acknowledged in the FTC’s own rulemaking record—yet the complaints continue to surface.

The problem for StubHub is not that critics are saying something new. The problem is that critics appear to be saying the same thing they were saying in Kaiser—only now the whole world is watching.

If the FIFA complaints ultimately prove as widespread as it appears, investors may begin asking uncomfortable questions that go well beyond customer service. Is speculative ticketing a disclosed business risk? Is it primarily a compliance problem? Or is it so deeply embedded in the economics of the marketplace that meaningful reform would materially affect revenue and growth? And, as they say, “have a materially adverse affect on StubHub’s business.”

Those are not questions typically asked by disappointed fans on social media. They are the kinds of questions asked by regulators, analysts, institutional investors, auditors, and securities lawyers.

The secondary ticketing industry has spent years arguing that it provides efficiency and liquidity. Governor Polis defended the practices as an “innovative online ticket waiting service” (yes, he really said that). The FIFA fiasco suggests something different: a system that privatizes gains, socializes risk, and too often leaves consumers holding the bag.

SB23-060 Veto Letter-1Download

For a public company operating under the gaze of both the FTC and the SEC, that should no longer be good enough.

Because the real risk for StubHub may not be the next user lawsuit, the next consumer arbitration demand, or even the next FTC inquiry. The real risk is that investors begin to conclude that what defenders have long described as isolated incidents are, in fact, permanent features of the unsavory business model itself.

by Trichordist

As Suno Celebrated a $5.4 Billion Valuation, Artists Took Their Message Directly to Wall Street

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 03: A mobile billboard sponsored by Human Artistry protesting Suno’s use of AI is pictured on display during Suno’s annual meeting on June 03, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Human Artistry Campaign)

On June 3, 2026, as investors and technology executives gathered at the UBS AI in Entertainment Summit at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, a plane circled overhead carrying a simple message: “SAY NO TO SUNO.” A second banner could just as easily have read, “Stealing Music Is Bad Karma.” The scene was more than a protest against a single AI music company. It was a reminder that technology itself is neither good nor evil; what matters is how humans choose to use it. Throughout history, some of the most transformative technologies have been driven by the same motivations that power every bully: greed and fear. Fear of being left behind. Fear of missing out. Greed for market share, dominance, and wealth and crushing anyone who gets in the way. The generative AI race increasingly appears to be driven—and corroded—by both.



That is why the protest above Santa Monica was about more than music. It connected directly to a broader national backlash against the infrastructure being built to support the AI economy. Across the United States, communities are fighting data centers, transmission lines, water consumption, tax subsidies, and industrial development projects that many believe are being imposed without meaningful public consent. Residents from Texas to Georgia to Louisiana are asking the same basic question: who benefits, and who pays the price?

In the case of generative AI, artists argue that they are among those paying the price.

The Human Artistry Campaign demonstration took place on the same day that Suno announced a funding round exceeding $400 million at a valuation of approximately $5.4 billion. Let it not be said that music has no value and that Suno is not free riding on a thriving market to extract their absurd valuation.

While Silicon Valley investors celebrated another milestone in AI’s rapid expansion, the protest highlighted an uncomfortable reality: much of the value being created by generative AI companies originates from extracting human expression while paying no regard whatsoever to those humans. Whether the source material is music, visual art, photography, authors, voice performances, or other creative works, creators continue to ask how their contributions found their way into commercial AI systems and demand the right to say no to Suno.

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 03: A plane sponsored by Human Artistry protesting Suno’s use of AI is pictured on display during Suno’s annual meeting on June 03, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Human Artistry Campaign)

The narrative that the AI labs want you to focus on is often framed as a conflict between innovation and regulation. That framing misses the point. The real question is whether innovation requires the abandonment of consent, compensation, and accountability. Human Artistry’s message was not anti-technology. Rather, it was that technology should serve human beings rather than treating them as raw material for extraction.

That concern increasingly links artist-rights advocates with communities opposing AI infrastructure projects using eminent domain powers to seize homes and compel residents to acept 765kV transmission lines. Both groups are confronting different manifestations of the same phenomenon: the concentration of economic gains among a relatively small number of companies while costs are dispersed across creators, workers, taxpayers, ratepayers, and local communities. One side sees its creative works absorbed into training datasets. The other sees land, water, energy resources, and public subsidies redirected toward facilities designed to power those systems.

Viewed through that lens, the protest at Shutters on the Beach becomes part of a much larger story. The controversy surrounding generative AI is no longer confined to copyright litigation or entertainment-industry politics. It now reaches questions of energy policy, infrastructure planning, local governance, environmental impact, and economic fairness.

The image of a protest banner flying above an investor summit captures that convergence perfectly. Below, financiers discussed the future of artificial intelligence and celebrated millions of dollars in new investment while licking their IPO chops in drooling anticipation of getting richer still on the backs of humanity. Above, artists and advocates posed a simpler question: if the future is being built on human creativity, shouldn’t the humans who created it have a meaningful voice in how that future is constructed?


That question is impossible to ignore. As billions continue to flow into AI companies and the infrastructure supporting them, the debate is no longer merely about technology. It is about power, consent, and who gets to decide how the benefits of human creativity and expression are captured by the Big Tech kleptocrats.

by Trichordist

A Subtle Shift in US AI Policy and Why Artists Should Pay Attention

Something is moving in Washington.

A recent report suggests that the Trump administration is considering a new executive order on artificial intelligence. On its face, that might sound like more of the same—another round of AI policy chatter promoted by David Sacks, the Silicon Valley lobbyist and billionaire investor who has been pushing a “don’t slow it down” approach.

But this time feels different.

Sacks appears to have gotten pushed out at least a bit. Don’t count the chickens just yet. But the shift in tone matters. And the timing matters even more. The order is reportedly being weighed ahead of Trump’s visit to China, where AI development has become a central axis of geopolitical competition.

That context changes the story. For the past several years, the dominant policy posture around AI has been simple: don’t slow down innovation. Because China.

That argument has been doing a lot of work. It has been used to wave away concerns about training data, to discourage state and local oversight of data center buildouts, and to greenlight massive infrastructure commitments—including dedicated nuclear power for AI campuses run by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

In other words: build the machine first. Deal with the consequences later.

Artists have been the raw material for that strategy.

Musicians, book authors, visual artists—these are not just inputs. They are the training ground for systems that are now capable of producing substitutive outputs that overwhelm creators and flood markets. And until now, the White House policy conversation has largely treated that massive theft as an acceptable cost of staying ahead led by David Sacks, R Street Institute and the hyperscalers.

What makes this potential executive order interesting is that it suggests a shift away from that posture. If the administration is preparing to meet with China on AI, it has an incentive to show that the United States takes control, governance, and strategic resources seriously. And in this context, creative works start to look less like “free fuel” and more like national assets.

That may matter for artists.

Because once you recognize that AI systems derive value from the signals embedded in creative works—voice, tone, style, expression—you start to see those works differently. They are not just content. They are repositories of identity and cultural value.

And they are being extracted at scale.

A more protective policy framework—whether it focuses on model review, training data standards, or provenance—creates an opening. It creates space for the idea that artists are not just upstream contributors, but stakeholders whose work underpins the entire system.

This doesn’t mean the executive order, if it comes, will solve the problem. It won’t.

But it could mark an inflection point.

If policymakers begin to treat AI not just as a technology race but as a resource competition, then the role of creators becomes harder to ignore. You can’t claim to lead in AI while simultaneously disregarding the human material that makes those systems work.

That contradiction is starting to surface. The industry allowed artists and even copyright itself to be lumped in with zoning boards as “bureaucracy” which in turn allowed David Sacks and his ilk to try to create an alternate universe where “innovation” ran wild to “beat China” while also selling chips to China out the back door.

For artists, the takeaway is simple: pay attention to the shift in tone. Policy signals often precede legal ones. What gets framed as a national priority today can become a regulatory framework tomorrow.

For the first time in a while, there are signs that the conversation may be moving—however slightly—toward recognizing the value that artists bring to the AI ecosystem.

Sacks may not be gone. Silicon Valley rarely loses outright, just look at the MLC. But even a partial shift away from the “move fast and ingest everything” playbook is meaningful.

Because for artists, the question has never been whether AI will be built.

The question is whether it will be built on you or with you.

by Trichordist

Phonorecords V and the “39 Steps” Problem: Time for the CRB to Fix Streaming Mechanicals

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking, everybody knows that the captain lied….
Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen

We are now well into the next Phonorecords proceeding at the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) where the government sets mechanical royalty rates for songwriters. Readers may remember that the last rate-setting was Phonorecords IV where Trichordist helped spread the word about the attempted end run around songwriters to freeze physical rates (vinyl & downloads) at 9.1¢ for another five years but instead resulted in an increase to 12¢ plus a cost of living adjustment which has now increased to 13.1¢. (In a demonstration of humility and lack of pomposity, these proceedings are given Roman numerals like the Super Bowl, so the current example of gladiatorial combat is titled Phonorecords V.)

Inside the years-long litigation-like proceeding, there is an issue hiding in plain sight inside the existing and ancient streaming mechanical royalty rate structure that we fondly call “the 39 steps” in honor of John Buchan, Alfred Hitchcock and Richard Hannay. Despite the blood lust for complexity from the ancien régime that clings to its one sided royalty pool, there is one part of this unfair business practice that the CRB can and should address this time around.

Start with the basics. The streaming mechanical formula—the so-called “39 steps”—is built on a simple premise: we are calculating royalties for the use of musical works protected by the Copyright Act. The inputs and deductions in that formula are not abstract accounting categories. They are supposed to reflect real payments for real statutory rights.

That premise is now under pressure because of…wait for it…artificial intelligence and the AI slop that is flooding the market.

The rise of generative AI has introduced a new category of output that does not fit neatly within the Copyright Act. The U.S. Copyright Office has made clear that works generated entirely by AI are not copyrightable, and that protection exists only to the extent of meaningful human authorship in a proportion yet to be determined. (Courts have moved in the same direction, and the Supreme Court’s denial of cert in Thaler v. Perlmutter leaves that framework intact.)

Yet the streaming mechanical formula has no explicit mechanism to deal with AI slop. That creates a risk on two fronts.

We have to consider the royalty pool itself. The compulsory mechanical license applies when the exclusive rights of a copyright owner in a musical work are implicated. If a so-called “AI track” is not a protected musical work, then there is a serious question whether it belongs in the section 115 system at all. Treating non-copyrightable output as if it were a statutory musical work risks diluting the pool for actual rightsholders.

And then, of course, we have the Step 2 deduction for performance royalties. The regulation allows services to subtract payments for the public performance of musical works before calculating the payable pool. But what happens if a service characterizes payments to a platform like AIMPRO as “performance royalties”? If those payments are not, in fact, for the public performance of a copyrightable musical work, they should not reduce the pool. Otherwise, the 39 steps formula starts to leak money, and eventually leak in a big way.

Not only that, but if the U.S. Copyright Office ultimately articulates a workable “human authorship” framework for AI-assisted works during the Phonorecords V rate period, the downstream impact on the Copyright Act section 115 system could be profound: for the first time, the “39 steps” calculation may have to accommodate fractional copyrightability within a single work. Instead of treating a musical work as an either/or, services and the MLC could be forced to parse which portions of a track are attributable to human authorship and therefore eligible for royalties, and which are not. That would introduce a new layer of allocation on top of an already complex formula—effectively embedding micro-level authorship determinations into macro-level royalty calculations—and raising the administrative, evidentiary, and dispute-resolution burdens across the entire system.

The key point is that the CRB does not need to resolve all questions of AI copyrightability to act here for purposes of the 39 Steps. It can simply clarify what is already in the statute and the regulation: The formula applies only to payments that correspond to rights in nondramatic musical works, and deductions are limited to payments that genuinely compensate the public performance of such works. That is not a policy innovation outside the scope of the CRB’s mandate from Congress. It is a classification rule.

If there is doubt about whether a category of material such as purely generative AI output qualifies as a “musical work” for these purposes, that is a question the CRB can refer to the Register of Copyrights in a pinch. But the CRB should not leave the door open for the mechanical royalty pool to be diluted by payments for things that fall outside the Copyright Act altogether. If you get a paycheck every week this may not be that important to you, but if you live off of royalties it damn sure is.

This may also be the moment to ask a more fundamental question: whether the industry should abandon the “39 steps” construct altogether. Whatever its historical justification—particularly in Phonorecords I back in 2009, where publishers were trying to shield early services like MusicNet from crushing retroactive exposure—the current formula has outlived its usefulness. Today, it functions less as a fair pricing mechanism and more as a constraint, allowing services to use their complementary oligopoly market power to effectively cap mechanical royalties by anchoring them to a royalty pool determined in part based on what labels get paid. The result is a structurally odd feedback loop in which sound recording deals influence the value of adjacent musical works. A cleaner alternative would be a flat, escalating penny-rate framework, like what the Judges adopted for both physical and downloads as well as webcasting royalties—simpler, more transparent, and far less susceptible to strategic manipulation.

We have been here before. The history of section 115 is, in many ways, the history of closing gaps between statutory language and market behavior.

Phonorecords V presents another such moment.

The CRB should take it.

by Trichordist

@hypebot: Jay Gilbert, Ryan Vaughn, & Benji Stein Share Expert Tips for Artist Growth in 2026

Check out a great discussion from our friends at Hypebot: The latest panel from MusicPro ’26 offers a useful snapshot of where “artist growth” advice stands heading into 2026—and where it may still be missing the mark.

In this Hypebot discussion, Jay Gilbert, Ryan Vaughn, and Benji Stein walk through the evolving toolkit for independent artists: data, audience development, and the growing skepticism around social media metrics. The throughline is clear—streams and followers don’t build careers; real fans do. The panel repeatedly returns to the importance of identifying and nurturing “actionable” fans over vanity metrics. 

But the more interesting takeaway may be what sits beneath that advice. As platforms flood artists with data, the real advantage increasingly lies in owning the relationship through email lists, direct engagement, and signals that actually convert into tickets, merch, and sustained attention. (And in our experience, owning the relationship is the one thing Spotify doesn’t want you to do.)

The result is a subtle but important shift: away from platform-defined success, and toward artist-controlled audience infrastructure.

The question, of course, is whether the current system actually rewards that shift—or quietly undermines it.

Read the post on Hypebot

by Trichordist

Chris Cooke: SoundExchange boss says all EU countries must change copyright rules so European radio royalties flow to American performers #IRespectMusic

Ireland Leads the Way: A Step Toward Fair Radio Royalties for American Artists in Europe

For years, American artists have been told that the global royalty system is just “complicated”—a patchwork of treaties, local rules, and reciprocal deals that somehow always seem to leave U.S. performers on the short end of the stick. But as this new report highlighted by CMU makes clear, what’s really at issue isn’t complexity. It’s discrimination dressed up as policy.

At the center of the debate is a simple principle: national treatment—the idea that countries should pay foreign creators the same royalties they pay their own. That principle is already embedded in international law and reinforced by recent European court decisions. And yet, across much of Europe, American performers still don’t get paid when their recordings are played on terrestrial radio, even while European artists are paid at home and abroad.

Now, SoundExchange is turning up the pressure, arguing that every EU member state must finally align its laws with that principle and unlock hundreds of millions in unpaid royalties.

This is exactly what our friend Blake Morgan and the #IRespectMusic campaign have been fighting for over the past decade—fair pay for performers wherever their music is used. And it’s another reminder that we join with the MusicFirst Coalition in demanding that the U.S. should lead by example: passing the American Music Fairness Act would strengthen hand of America’s creators globally and help ensure U.S. artists are paid both at home and abroad.

This isn’t just a technical copyright dispute. It’s a global trade and fairness issue—one that goes directly to how countries value music as an export, and whether creators are treated as partners in that economy or just inputs to be exploited.

Read Chris Cooke’s excellent explainer in Complete Music Update

The boss of US collecting society SoundExchange has welcomed a change to Irish copyright law which means radio royalties collected in Ireland can now flow to American performers when their music gets airplay in the country. Even though no radio royalties flow in the other direction to European performers, because radio stations in the US don’t have to pay any money to any artists or labels. 

That change to Irish law was the result of a ruling in the European Union courts which, SoundExchange CEO Michael Huppe insists, also obligates other EU countries to implement similar changes, so that more radio royalties flow to the US. “Implementation isn’t optional – it’s a legal obligation”, Huppe says, adding, “creators everywhere deserve to be paid when their music is used, no matter their nationality”. 

by Trichordist

California Takes a Step Toward Ending Speculative Ticketing

One of the most frustrating tricks in the ticket resale business is something called speculative ticketing. That’s when someone lists a ticket for sale before they actually have the ticket. We’ve discussed the problem many times, but Kid Rock brought it to a head recently during a hearing on Capitol Hill.

If you haven’t run across spec ticking before, here it is: The seller is essentially betting they will be able to obtain the ticket later. If they succeed, they deliver the ticket to the buyer. If they don’t, the buyer often ends up with a refund—or a replacement ticket of uncertain quality—instead of the seat they thought they purchased.

For fans and artists, the bigger problem is what speculative listings do to the market before the onsale even begins.

When fans check resale marketplaces and see hundreds of tickets already listed—often at inflated prices—it creates the impression that tickets are already scarce or sold out. That perception alone can push fans to panic-buy at higher prices, even when the actual ticket inventory hasn’t even been released yet.

In other words, speculative listings can make the market look hotter and tighter than it really is.

Ironically, most of the major resale platforms already say this practice is prohibited on their service. Their terms of service typically ban selling tickets that the seller does not actually possess.

Yet those same marketplaces often display large numbers of listings that appear to be exactly that: tickets offered for sale before the seller could reasonably have them in hand.

California is now attempting to address this problem directly. A new proposal would make it clear that selling tickets you do not possess—or do not have the legal right to sell—is a deceptive practice under consumer protection law. It would also allow state and local authorities to enforce those rules, rather than leaving fans to fight the battle on their own.

That proposal is California Assembly Bill 1349 (AB 1349).

AB 1349 aims to close the gap between what resale platforms claim to prohibit and what actually happens in the marketplace. The basic principle is simple: if a ticket is listed for sale, it should be a real ticket controlled by the seller, not a speculative promise that may or may not be fulfilled later.

The bill will not fix every problem in the ticketing ecosystem. But it represents an important step toward restoring a basic level of honesty to the resale market. After all, if the platforms themselves say you shouldn’t sell a ticket you don’t have, putting that rule into law should not be controversial.

For artists and fans alike, the idea behind AB 1349 comes down to something pretty straightforward:

You shouldn’t be able to sell a ticket you don’t actually own.

by Trichordist

Synthetic Emotion from The Music Department: Suno’s Unsettling Ad Campaign and the Return of Orwell’s Machine-Made Culture from 1984

In George Orwell’s 1984, the “versificator” was a machine designed to produce poetry, songs, and sentimental verse synthetically, without human thought or feeling. Its purpose was not artistic expression but industrial-scale cultural production—filling the air with endless, disposable content to occupy attention and shape perception. Nearly a century later, the comparison to modern generative music systems such as Suno is difficult to ignore. While the technologies differ dramatically, the underlying question is strikingly similar: what happens when music is produced by machines at scale rather than by human experience?

Orwell’s versificator was built for scale, not meaning (reminding you of anyone?). It generated formulaic songs for the masses, optimized for emotional familiarity rather than originality. Suno, by contrast, uses sophisticated machine learning trained on vast corpora of human-created music to generate complete recordings on demand that would be the envy of Big Brother’s Music Department. Suno can reportedly generate millions of tracks per day, a level of output impossible in any human-centered musical economy. When music becomes infinitely reproducible, the limiting factor shifts from creation to distribution and attention—precisely the dynamic Orwell imagined.

Nothing captures the versificator analogy more vividly than Suno’s own dystopian-style “first kiss” advertisingcampaign. In one widely circulated spot, the product is promoted through a stylized, synthetic emotional narrative that emphasizes instant, machine-generated musical cliche creation untethered from human musicians, vocalists, or composers. The message is not about artistic struggle, collaboration, or lived expression—it is about mediocre frictionless production. The ad unintentionally echoes Orwell’s warning: when culture can be manufactured instantly, expression becomes simulation. And on top of it, those ads are just downright creepy.

The versificator also blurred authorship. In 1984, no individual poet existed behind the machine’s output; creativity was subsumed into a system. Suno raises a comparable question. If a system trained on thousands or millions of human performances produces a new track, where does authorship reside? With the user who typed a prompt? With the engineers who built the model? With the countless musicians whose expressive choices shaped the training data? Or nowhere at all? This diffusion of authorship challenges long-standing cultural and legal assumptions about what it means to “create” music.

Another parallel lies in standardization. The versificator produced content that was emotionally predictable—pleasant, familiar, subservient and safe. Generative music systems often display a similar gravitational pull toward stylistic averages embedded in their training data that has been averaged into pablum. The result can be competent, even polished output that nevertheless lacks the unpredictability, risk, and individual voice associated with human artistry. Orwell’s concern was not that machine-generated culture would be bad, but that it would be flattened—replacing lived expression with algorithmic imitation. Substitutional, not substantial.

There is also a structural similarity in scale and economics. The versificator’s value to The Party lay in its ability to replace human labor in cultural production and to force the creation of projects that humans would find too creepy. Suno and similar systems raise analogous questions for modern musicians, particularly session players and composers whose work historically formed the backbone of recorded music. When a single system can generate instrumental tracks, arrangements, and stylistic variations instantly, the economic pressure on human contributors becomes obvious. Orwell imagined machines replacing poets; today the substitution pressure may fall first on instrumental performance, arrangement, sound designer, and production roles.

Yet the comparison has limits, and those limits matter. The versificator was a tool of centralized control in a dystopian state, designed to narrow human thought. Suno operates in a pluralistic technological environment where many artists themselves experiment with AI as a creative instrument. Unlike Orwell’s machine, generative music systems can be used collaboratively, interactively, and sometimes in ways that expand rather than suppress creative exploration. The technology is not inherently dystopian; its impact depends on how institutions, markets, and creators choose to shape it.

A deeper difference lies in intention. Orwell’s versificator was never meant to create art; it was meant to simulate it. Modern generative music systems are often framed as tools that can assist, augment, or inspire human creativity. Some artists use AI to prototype ideas, explore unfamiliar styles, or generate textures that would be difficult to produce otherwise. In these contexts, the machine functions less like a replacement and more like a new instrument—one whose cultural role is still evolving.

Still, Orwell’s versificator is highly relevant to understanding Suno’s corporate direction. When cultural production becomes industrialized, quantity can overwhelm meaning. The risk is not merely that machine-generated music exists, but that its scale reshapes attention, value, and recognition. If millions of synthetic tracks flood listening environments as is happening with some large DSPs, the signal of individual human expression may become harder to perceive—even if human creativity continues to exist beneath the surface.

The comparison between Suno and the versificator symbolizes the moment when technology challenges the boundaries of authorship, creativity, and cultural labor. Orwell warned of a world where machines produced endless culture without human voice. Today’s question is subtler: can society integrate generative systems in ways that preserve the distinctiveness of human expression rather than dissolving it into algorithmic slop?

The answer will not come from technology alone. It will depend on choices—legal, cultural, and economic—about how machine-generated music is labeled, valued, and integrated into the broader creative ecosystem. Orwell imagined a future where the machine replaced the poet. The task now is to ensure that, even in an age of generative AI, the humans remains audible.

by Trichordist

Stealing Isn’t Innovation!

Don’t let the so-called “AI czar” sell you the idea that changing the law to legalize taking artists’ work without consent is innovation. It isn’t.

Innovation creates new value. The AI boondoggle takes existing value from creators and communities and hands it to a small number of tech companies—without permission, without payment, and without accountability but with a nuclear reactor next to your house.

Artists aren’t raw material. They’re rights-holders under U.S. law. Rewriting those rights to subsidize AI business models isn’t progress—it’s a policy choice to reward theft at scale.

AI can thrive without gutting creative rights. But that requires consent, licensing, and fair compensation—not retroactive immunity dressed up as innovation.

Stealing isn’t innovation. It’s just stealing, with a press strategy.

Find out more at Stealing Isn’t Innovation and @human_artistry

by Trichordist