Category: artist rights

Kafka’s Hypothetical Market Strikes Again: The DSPs’ Latest Move to Silence Songwriters by Throwing GMR Out of Phonorecords V

If you want to understand how the streaming services really view songwriters, look no further than their joint motion to exclude Global Music Rights (GMR) from Phonorecords V. It is not subtle. It is not principled. It is an attempt to narrow the field to those voices the services already know how to manage. (All of these services are being investigated by the Texas Attorney General “over alleged payola schemes in which they accept bribes to artificially promote certain songs, artists, or content.”)

Services’ Joint Motion to Exclude GMR (For Filing)Download

The Services—Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora, and Google—argue that GMR lacks a “significant interest” because it licenses performance rights rather than mechanical rights. That argument is technically obvious and substantively hollow, a mile wide and an inch deep, if that. GMR represents songwriters whose mechanical royalties are directly at issue in this proceeding. The idea that those songwriters somehow lose their “significant interest” because their representative also licenses performance rights is not just formalism. It is exclusion by design.

Let’s be clear about what is at stake. GMR affiliates include some of the most commercially significant songwriters in the world—writers like Drake, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Pharrell Williams, Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, Pearl Jam, Prince, and Tyler, the Creator. Nobody else in this proceeding speaks for them. Not the NMPA, which represents publishers. Not the services, who are adverse. And certainly not a system that already tilts toward the parties who can afford to litigate at scale.

When songwriters affiliated with Global Music Rights made a choice about how to license their work, they chose a free market model. They chose to be represented by GMR and to negotiate performance royalties directly with users, in arm’s-length, private negotiations reflecting real-world value. That decision matters. It reflects a preference for market pricing over regulatory pricing, and for merit over compulsion.

But the moment you shift from performance rights to mechanical rights, that choice disappears. Why?

Well, that’s a good question, but the answer for now is that under section 115 of the Copyright Act, those same songwriters are forced into a compulsory license regime administered in large part through the CRB which sets the rates. They cannot opt out. They cannot negotiate freely. Instead, their work is swept into a statutory system where rates are set through a complex, expensive, and heavily lawyered process that bears little resemblance to a functioning market. It is a hypothetical market.

So we end up in a strange place, a Kafkaesque place. The same songwriter who can negotiate directly for the public performance of their work is denied that freedom when it comes to the reproduction and distribution of that same work. One side of the market is competitive and arms length. The other is managed and hypothetical.

That is not a neutral design choice. It is a structural constraint—one that continues to shape outcomes in favor of the services.

The Services claim that GMR lacks a “direct financial interest” in the outcome. That is a remarkable position. The entire proceeding is about setting the value of musical works in streaming. If the rate goes down, songwriters get paid less. If the rate goes up, they get paid more. That is the definition of a direct financial interest. The Services’ attempt to redefine “direct” to exclude the very creators whose works are being priced is not statutory interpretation. It is outcome engineering.

The Services also argue that GMR’s interest is merely “indirect” or “attenuated.” This requires ignoring the bargaining power of the songwriters who effectively are GMR. But this is the same playbook the services have used for years: isolate each rights silo, then argue that no one outside the narrowest licensing box is entitled to speak. The result is a fragmented system where the only voices that remain are those structurally aligned with the services’ preferred outcome.

Then there is the efficiency argument—the Services’ claim that allowing GMR to participate would make the proceeding “lengthy, complex, and expensive.” As opposed to what? Nasty, brutish and short?

That would be more persuasive if it were not coming from the very companies that have turned CRB proceedings into multi-year, multi-million-dollar wars of attrition. These are the largest corporations in commercial history (at least one of which is an adjudicated monopoly) arguing that the problem is too many songwriters having a voice.

Let’s call this what it is: a coordinated effort by a handful of dominant platforms to use their collective market power—and their litigation budgets—to shape the CRB process in their favor. The same companies that work relentlessly to drive down the royalties paid to songwriters are now trying to limit who is allowed to advocate for those songwriters to get fair treatment in the first place.

And here is the practical reality the Services are ignoring: even if the Judges exclude GMR, they are not solving the problem. They are postponing it. When the decision is released for public comment, the absence of these voices will not go unnoticed. It will be exposed—and it will undermine the legitimacy of the outcome. Because they’ll be back for comments which will attack the entire proceeding as arbitrary.

The CRB process already leans heavily toward those who can afford to participate. That is a structural fact. But actively excluding a representative of major songwriters—on the theory that those songwriters do not have a “significant interest” in how their own royalties are set—crosses a different line.

The Judges should reject this motion out of hand.

Because if the people who write the songs do not have a seat at the table, then whatever this process is—it is not a willing buyer, willing seller marketplace. Excluding GMR would raise the question of whether it was ever intended to be one.

by Trichordist Editor

Mýa Backs AMFA as Momentum Builds for Fair Pay for Radio Play

L-R: SX CEO Mike Huppe, Mya, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

Momentum around the American Music Fairness Act is building, and that’s a good thing. When Michael Huppe says artists not being paid for terrestrial radio airplay is “flat out wrong,” he’s right. The American Music Fairness Act (AMFA) closes the loop on Congress’s work beginning in 1995 to create a digital performance right in sound recordings. It extends that framework to terrestrial radio, ensuring artists and sound recording owners are paid consistently across platforms while preserving protections for small and local broadcasters.

The U.S. remains an outlier globally, denying performers a basic neighboring right recognized nearly everywhere else. Mýa’s presence underscores what’s at stake: real artists, real livelihoods. AMFA is about correcting a structural imbalance—one that has allowed broadcasters to monetize recordings without compensating those who made them. We appreciate the growing number of leaders in Congress working to get this right.

For more information on the American Music Fairness Act and the broader policy effort to align U.S. law with global norms, see the musicFIRST Coalition. They track the legislation, outline the issues, and provide a way to stay informed or engage if you choose.

by thetrichordist

@RonanFarrow and @AndrewMarantz: Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz investigate Sam Altman’s leadership of OpenAI, based on internal documents and more than 100 interviews. They center on a core tension: Altman has positioned himself as a steward of humanity’s most powerful technology, yet many colleagues and insiders question whether he can be trusted with that responsibility. Internal memos compiled by senior figures—including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever—allege a pattern of misleading statements and evasiveness, particularly around AI safety and governance.  Shocking, ain’t it?

The piece traces OpenAI’s evolution from a nonprofit founded to prioritize safety over profit into a commercially driven company pursuing massive scale and valuation. Along the way, Altman is portrayed as highly ambitious, politically savvy, and willing to push boundaries—sometimes at the expense of transparency or institutional safeguards. 

It also situates these concerns within the broader stakes of artificial general intelligence: if such systems emerge, the individuals controlling them could wield unprecedented global power. The article ultimately raises an unresolved question—whether the rapid centralization of technological authority in a single leader and company is compatible with the level of trust and accountability that such power demands.

Read it on the New Yorker.

by thetrichordist

Inside Royalty Audits with Keith Bernstein: Lessons from Chris Castle’s Music Contracts & AI Class at UT Law

Let’s face it: Audit rights are only as good as your auditor.

In this ARI Artist Financial Education session—recorded for Chris Castle’s music business and AI class at the University of Texas School of Law—we got a gem. Keith Bernstein, one of the top royalty auditors in the music business, joins Chris for a practical discussion of DSP and royalty audits. As the force behind Royalty Review Council and Crunch Digital, and its proprietary clearance tool Tempo, Keith has spent decades uncovering how royalties are reported, misreported, and contested.

Keith walks us through how audits actually work, contract limitations on audit rights, where discrepancies tend to surface, and why leverage often matters more than contract language. After decades in the field, Keith has seen where the money goes and where it doesn’t. This conversation cuts through the theory and gets into how audits really work, where the gaps are, and why audit rights only matter if you can enforce them.

Watch the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cirxW12BS2k

Background reading: Donald S. Passman, All You Need to Know About the Music Business 11th Edition, 54–55, 70, 313, 408.

by Trichordist Editor

@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

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

Don’t Sell What You Don’t Have: Why AB 1349’s Crackdown on Speculative Event Tickets Matters to Touring Artists and Fans

Update: AB 1349 passed the California Assembly, on to the Senate.

I rely on ticket revenue to pay my band and crew, and I depend on trust—between me and my fans—for my career to work at all. That’s why I support California’s AB 1349. At its core, this bill confronts one of the most corrosive practices in touring: speculative ticketing.

Speculative ticketing isn’t normal resale. It’s when sellers list tickets they don’t actually own and may never acquire. These listings often appear at inflated prices on reseller markets before tickets even go on sale, with no guarantee the seller can deliver the seat. In other words, it’s selling a promise, not a ticket. Fans may think they bought a ticket, but what they’ve really bought is a gamble that the reseller can later obtain the seat—usually at a lower price—and flip it to them while the reseller marketplace looks the other way.

Here’s how it works in practice. A reseller posts a listing, sometimes even a specific section, row, and seat, before they possess anything. The marketplace presents that listing like real inventory: seat maps, countdown timers, “only a few left” banners. That creates artificial scarcity before a single legitimate ticket has even been sold. Once tickets go on sale, the reseller tries to “cover” the sale—buying tickets during the onsale (often using bots or multiple accounts), buying from other resellers who did secure inventory, or substituting some “comparable” seat if the promised one doesn’t exist at an arbitrage price. If they can source lower than what they sold to the fan, they pocket the difference.

When that gamble fails, the risk gets dumped on the fan. Prices jump. Inventory really sells out. The reseller can’t deliver. What follows is a last-minute cancellation, a refund that arrives too late to help, a downgrade to worse seats, or a customer-service maze between the seller and the platform. Fans blame artists even if the artists had nothing to do with the arbitrage. I’ve seen fans get priced out because listings appeared online that had nothing to do with the actual onsale.   The reseller and the marketplace profit themselves while the fan, artist and venue suffer.

AB 1349 draws a bright-line rule that should have existed years ago: if you don’t actually have the ticket—or a contractual right to sell it—you can’t list it. That single principle collapses the speculative model. You can’t post phantom seats or inflate prices using imaginary inventory. It doesn’t ban resale. It doesn’t cap prices. It does stop a major source of fraud.

The bill also tackles the deception that makes speculative ticketing profitable. Fake “sold out” claims, copycat websites that look like official artist or venue pages, and listings that bury or hide face value all push fans into rushed, fear-based decisions. AB 1349 requires transparency about whether a ticket is a resale, what the original face price was, and what seat is actually being offered. That information lets fans make rational choices—and it reduces the backlash that inevitably lands on performers and venues when fans feel tricked.

Bots and circumvention tools are another part of the speculative pipeline. Artists and venues spend time and money designing fair onsales, presales for fan clubs, and purchase limits meant to spread tickets across real people. Automated systems that evade those limits defeat the entire purpose, feeding inventory into speculative listings within seconds. AB 1349 doesn’t outlaw resale; it targets the deliberate technological abuse that turns live music into a high-speed extraction game.

I also support the bill’s enforcement structure. This isn’t about turning fans into litigants or flooding courts. It’s about giving public enforcers real tools to police a market that has repeatedly shown it won’t self-regulate.

AB 1349 won’t fix everything overnight. But by stopping people from selling what they don’t have, it moves ticketing back toward a system built on possession, truth, and accountability. If every state prohibited speculative ticketing, it would largely disappear because resale would finally be backed by real inventory. For fans who just want to see the music they love—that’s not radical. It’s essential.

[This post first appeared on Hypebot]

by Dr. David C Lowery

Victory in the Vetter v. Resnik Lawsuit: Artist Rights, Songwriter Advocacy, and the Power of Termination

At the center of Vetter v. Resnik are songwriters reclaiming what Congress promised them in a detailed and lengthy legislative negotiation over the 1976 revision to the Copyright Act—a meaningful second chance to terminate what the courts call “unremunerative transfers,” aka crappy deals. That principle comes into sharp focus through Cyril Vetter, whose perseverance brought this case to the Fifth Circuit, and Cyril’s attorney Tim Kappel, whose decades-long advocacy for songwriter rights helped frame the issues not as abstractions, but as lived realities.

Cyril won his case against his publisher at trial in a landmark judicial ruling by Chief Judge Shelly Dick. His publisher appealed Judge Dick’s ruling to the Fifth Circuit. As readers will remember, oral arguments in the case were earlier this year. A bunch of songwriter and author groups including the Artist Rights Institute filed “friend of the court” briefs in the case in favor of Cyril.

In a unanimous opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed Judge Shelly Dick’s carefully reasoned trial-court ruling, holding that when an author terminates a worldwide grant, the recapture also worldwide. It is not artificially limited to U.S. territory only, which had been the industry practice. The court understood that anything less would hollow out Congress’s intent.

It is often said that the whole point of the termination law is to give authors (including songwriters) a “second bite at the apple”. Which is why the Artist Rights Institute wrote (and was quoted by the 5th Circuit) that limiting the reversion to US rights only is a “second bite at half the apple” which was the opposite of Congressional intent.

25-30108-2026-01-12Download



What made this 5th Circuit decision especially meaningful for the creative community is that the Fifth Circuit did not reach it in a vacuum. Writing for the panel, Judge Carl Stewart expressly quoted the Artist Rights Institute amicus brief, observing:

“Denying terminating authors the full return of a worldwide grant leaves them with only half of the apple—the opposite of congressional intent.”

That sentence—simple, vivid, and unmistakably human—captured what this case has always been about.

ARI.Amicus.Vetter.Final RDownload



The Artist Rights Institute’s amicus brief did not appear overnight. It grew out of a longstanding relationship between songwriter advocate Tim Kappel and Chris Castle, a collaboration shaped over many years by shared concern for how statutory rights actually function—or fail to function—for creators in the real world.

When the Vetter appeal crystallized the stakes, that history mattered. It allowed ARI to move quickly, confidently, and with credibility—translating dense statutory language into a narrative to help courts understand that termination rights are supposed to restore leverage, not preserve a publisher’s foreign control veto through technicalities.

Crucially, the brief was inspired and strengthened by the voices of songwriter advocates and heirs, including Abby North (heir of composer Alex North), Blake Morgan (godson of songwriter Lesley Gore), and Angela Rose White (heir of legendary music director David Rose) and of course David Lowery and Nikki Rowling. The involvement of these heirs ensured the court understood context—termination is not merely about renegotiating deals for living authors. It is often about families, estates, and heirs—people for whom Congress explicitly preserved termination rights as a matter of intergenerational fairness.

The Fifth Circuit’s opinion reflects that understanding. By rejecting a cramped territorial reading of termination, the court avoided a result that would have undermined heirs’ rights just as surely as authors’ rights.

Vetter v. Resnik represents a rare and welcome alignment: an author willing to press his statutory rights all the way, advocates who understood the lived experience behind those rights, a district judge who took Congress at its word, and an appellate court willing to say plainly that “half of the apple” is not enough.

For the Artist Rights Institute, it was an honor to participate—to stand alongside Cyril Vetter, Tim Kappel, and the community of songwriter advocates and heirs whose experiences shaped a brief that helped the court see the full picture.

And for artists, songwriters, and their families, the decision stands as a reminder that termination rights mean what Congress said they mean—a real chance to reclaim ownership, not an illusion bounded by geography.

by thetrichordist