Category: #irespectmusic Campaign

The American Music Fairness Act: Will Justice Cross the Finish Line

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.

This Is Not a Small-Radio-Killer Bill

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.

And Artists Actually Get Paid

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 Whip Count

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.

Don’t Rule Out the Lame Duck

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.

by thetrichordist

This Isn’t Just Copyright—It’s Trade Discrimination Against American Creators

Readers of this blog know we’ve spent years supporting the American Music Fairness Act and its predecessor legislation, as well as the tireless efforts of the MusicFIRST Coalition and Blake Morgan’s #IRespectMusic campaign to modernize U.S. law. The argument has always been simple: the United States is virtually alone among developed nations in refusing to pay recording artists when their music is played on AM/FM radio. We’ve long argued that this is unfair to American performers.

Now it may become something even worse.

On July 8, an unusually broad coalition representing virtually every corner of the American music industry—including performers, musicians, independent labels, collecting societies, unions, songwriters’ organizations, managers, and the Recording Academy—sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer warning that the European Commission has indicated it may consider legislation that could use this gap in U.S. law as the basis for reducing or denying royalties to American performers and record companies in Europe.

ustr-national-treatment-letter-final-july-20268Download

According to the coalition, nearly $300 million in annual royalties could be at risk if Europe abandons the longstanding principle of national treatment in favor of what proponents call “material reciprocity,” the latest mercantilist dodge.  The coalition urged the Administration to oppose any such proposal as a trade matter.  They identified passage of the American Music Fairness Act as the most direct way to eliminate the rationale behind Europe’s proposed policy shift.

That makes this story about far more than royalties for broadcasts (“neighboring rights”). It is about whether a longstanding defect in U.S. copyright law is beginning to produce real economic consequences for American creators overseas—and why organizations that rarely agree have united to ask the United States government to respond and protect American creators.

What Is National Treatment?

For generations, national treatment has been one of the foundational principles of international copyright and neighboring rights. Simply put, when another country uses an American recording, American performers generally receive the same treatment that country gives its own creators. That principle has helped ensure that American musicians, background singers, session players, independent artists, and record companies receive compensation when their recordings are broadcast or publicly performed overseas.

The policy now being discussed in Europe would move away from that principle in favor of what proponents call material reciprocity. The phrase sounds technical—even fair. It is anything but straightforward.

“Material reciprocity” sounds like a neutral rule requiring countries to treat one another equally. It is more accurately an optional exception to national treatment derived from the reservation provisions of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. The treaty permits a country to limit protection to the extent another country has limited its own remuneration right; it does not require that result.

In practice, the proposed European approach would allow royalties generated by the use of American recordings in Europe to be withheld from the American performers whose recordings generated them, based on a defect in U.S. law over which those creators have little control and have done their best to rid themselves.

In other words, Europe would not be saying American recordings have no value. Make no mistake, those recordings would still be broadcast. Broadcasters would still pay royalties. The question—as usual—would simply become who gets the money? Spoiler alert—it’s not the artist who earned the money.

Why This Is Happening

The immediate backdrop is the 2020 decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in RAAP, which held that American performers are entitled to equitable remuneration under existing European law. Following that decision, most EU member states amended their laws to comply.

cp200110enDownload

Not everyone welcomed that result.

IMPALA, which represents independent record companies across Europe, has been among the organizations urging the European Commission to restore “material reciprocity” after RAAP. Its position is straightforward: European performers and labels should not be required to share European neighboring-rights royalties with American performers when the United States provides no comparable terrestrial radio right to Europeans—even if the U.S. performers earned those royalties in Europe.  Get it?

There is a certain irony here.

For years, supporters of the American Music Fairness Act argued that Congress should fix the terrestrial radio loophole because it unfairly denied American performers compensation at home. Now that same loophole is being cited overseas as justification for reducing compensation paid to American performers abroad.

Whether one agrees with IMPALA or not, the dispute illustrates that copyright policy increasingly operates as trade policy.

A Remarkably Broad Coalition

One of the most significant aspects of the coalition’s July 8 letter to the USTR is who signed up to it.  The coalition includes organizations representing performers, musicians, recording artists, independent labels, managers, unions, composers, songwriters, and collecting societies. These organizations represent different constituencies, pursue different priorities, and advocate competing legislative agendas.

Yet on this issue they have found common ground.  Their message is straightforward: American creators should continue receiving the same treatment in Europe that European countries provide their own creators.

That breadth of commitment is significant.

In an era when the music industry is often divided over artificial intelligence, streaming economics, licensing reform, Copyright Royalty Board proceedings, and virtually every other major policy debate, this level of agreement is unusual.

That alone should command policymakers’ attention.

This Is About More Than $300 Million

The dollar figure understandably grabs headlines.  But the larger issue is fundamental fairness.

American recordings account for a substantial share of music played on European radio—royalty generating plays on European radio. The royalties generated by those performances are not theoretical. They represent meaningful income for performers whose recordings continue to create value around the world, often years or decades after they were made.

Once governments begin replacing national treatment with reciprocity tests, the stability of international rights system begins to erode. Other countries may decide to revisit their own neighboring-rights systems, creating a patchwork of nationality-based rules that ultimately harms creators everywhere.

For many American performers—particularly independent artists, session musicians, and legacy performers—these foreign neighboring-rights royalties are not windfalls. They are earned compensation for recordings that continue to succeed internationally.

More Than Copyright: A Trade Issue

The coalition is not asking merely for a change in IP policy. It is asking the United States Trade Representative to treat this as a matter of international trade affecting American creators and one of America’s most successful cultural exports.

That is a significant development.

The music industry has long viewed copyright disputes primarily through the lens of intellectual property. This coalition letter recognizes that international copyright rules increasingly function as trade rules as well. Decisions made in Brussels can directly affect the income of American creators and the competitiveness of American cultural exports.  As the coalition letter states:

National treatment has long been a cornerstone of the global copyright system, ensuring American creators—including recording artists, musicians, and performers—are treated no less favorably than domestic rightsholders abroad. The Commission’s proposed shift to reciprocity would condition these protections on U.S. law, replacing a clear, rules-based system with one that is fragmented, uncertain and would directly disadvantage U.S. creators in foreign markets….Left unchecked, this approach will erode nondiscrimination principles, invite retaliatory measures, and weaken transatlantic cooperation on intellectual property.

The central trade question is not difficult to understand: should a foreign government be permitted to collect royalties generated by the exploitation of American recordings while denying those royalties to the American performers and producers whose work generated them?  Again from the letter:

USTR has already taken an important step by placing the European Union on the Special 301 Watch List. We encourage the Administration to build on this action by fully leveraging available trade tools—including sustained bilateral engagement, coordinated multilateral pressure, and, if necessary, targeted enforcement measures—to prevent the adoption of material reciprocity and ensure compliance with national treatment obligations.

Calling that result “material reciprocity” does not make it any less discriminatory in practice.

Why This Is Significant

International copyright rarely receives widespread public attention until the consequences become irreversible.  

The debate over artificial intelligence has reminded us how quickly longstanding norms can come under pressure. Whether the issue is AI training, streaming economics, or neighboring rights, the underlying question remains remarkably consistent:

Will creators continue to receive fair compensation when others profit from their work?

When the Industry Speaks With One Voice

The music industry rarely agrees on anything. Artists and record labels disagree. Major labels and independent labels disagree. Managers, unions, publishers, collecting societies, and digital services often find themselves on opposite sides of legislative and regulatory debates. That is precisely why this coalition is important..

Organizations representing performers, musicians, managers, independent labels, unions, composers, and collecting societies, have all concluded that this issue deserves the immediate attention of the United States government. Whether the European Commission ultimately moves forward with legislation remains to be seen. But the coalition deserves credit for bringing the issue to the attention of the U.S. Trade Representative before any formal legislative proposal has been introduced.

If nothing else, the letter serves as an early warning that international copyright policy and international trade policy are becoming increasingly intertwined—and that decisions made in Brussels can have significant consequences for American creators.

For now, the most important takeaway is simple: pay attention. The music industry rarely speaks with one voice. When it does, policymakers should listen.

This is a story worth watching, and we’ll continue to follow it as it develops.

by thetrichordist

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

The Word “If” is for Losers: Gene Simmons Nails It on American Music Fairness Act

Senator Marsha Blackburn and Gene Simmons testified today at the Senate Judiciary Committee on fixing artist pay for radio play with the American Music Fairness Act—both knocked it out of the park. As Senator Blackburn said very clearly, corporate radio wants to be treated as a special and protected class for no good reason. As she said, the creative community has waited a very long time for fair treatment.

Now Gene Simmons…lived up to his billing. Absolutely charming and emphatic about driving AMFA through the tape. Has to be seen to be believed and absolutely electrifying. As he said, artists need radio and radio needs artists. “Let’s get with it” NAB.

You can watch the entire hearing above or Gene’s written testimony and highlight reel below.

2025-12-09-pm_testimony_simmonsDownload
by Trichordist Editor

Gene Simmons and the American Music Fairness Act

Gene Simmons is receiving Kennedy Center Honors with KISS this Sunday, and is also bringing his voice to the fair pay for radio play campaign to pass the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA).

Gene will testify on AMFA next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He won’t just be speaking as a member of KISS or as one of the most recognizable performers in American music. He’ll be showing up as a witness to something far more universal: the decades-long exploitation of recording artists whose work powers an entire broadcast industry and that has never paid them a dime. Watch Gene’s hearing on December 9th at 3pm ET at this link, when Gene testifies alongside SoundExchange CEO Mike Huppe.

As Gene argued in his Washington Post op-ed, the AM/FM radio loophole is not a quirky relic, it is legalized taking. Everyone else pays for music: streaming services, satellite radio, social-media platforms, retail, fitness, gaming. Everyone except big broadcast radio, which generated more than $13 billion in advertising revenue last year while paying zero to the performers whose recordings attract those audiences.

Gene is testifying not just for legacy acts, but for the “thousands of present and future American recording artists” who, like KISS in the early days, were told to work hard, build a fan base, and just be grateful for airplay. As he might put it, artists were expected to “rock and roll all night” — but never expect to be paid for it on the radio.

And when artists asked for change, they were told to wait. They “keep on shoutin’,” decade after decade, but Congress never listened.

That’s why this hearing matters. It’s the first Senate-level engagement with the issue since 2009. The ground is shifting. Gene Simmons’ presence signals something bigger: artists are done pretending that “exposure” is a form of compensation.

AMFA would finally require AM/FM broadcasters to pay for the sound recordings they exploit, the same way every other democratic nation already does. It would give session musicians, backup vocalists, and countless independent artists a revenue stream they should have had all along. It would even unlock international royalties currently withheld from American performers because the U.S. refuses reciprocity.

And let’s be honest: Gene Simmons is an ideal messenger. He built KISS from nothing, understands the grind, and knows exactly how many hands touch a recording before it reaches the airwaves. His testimony exposes the truth: radio isn’t “free promotion” — it’s a commercial business built on someone else’s work.

Simmons once paraphrased the music economy as a game where artists are expected to give endlessly while massive corporations act like the only “god of thunder,” taking everything and returning nothing. AMFA is an overdue correction to that imbalance.

When Gene sits down before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he won’t be wearing the makeup. He won’t need to. He’ll be carrying something far more powerful: the voices of artists who’ve waited 80 years for Congress to finally turn the volume up on fairness.

by Trichordist

Don’t Let Congress Reward the Stations That Don’t Pay Artists

As we’ve been posting about for years—alongside Blake Morgan and the #IRespectMusic movement that you guys have been so good about supporting—there’s still a glaring failure at the heart of U.S. copyright law: performing artists and session musicians receive no royalty for AM/FM radio airplay. Every other developed country (and practically every other country) compensates performers for broadcast use, yet the United States continues to exempt terrestrial radio from paying the people who record the music.

Now Congress is preparing to pass the AM Radio in Every Car Act, a massive government intervention that would literally install the instrument of unfairness into every new car at significant cost to consumers. It’s a breathtaking example of how far the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) will go to preserve its century-old free ride—by lobbying for public subsidies while refusing to pay artists a penny. This isn’t public service; it’s policy cruelty dressed up as nostalgia.

Hundreds of artists have already spoken out in a letter to Congress demanding fairness through the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA). Their action matters—and yours does too.

👉 Here’s what you can do:

Don’t let Washington hard-wire injustice into every dashboard. Demand that Congress fix the problem before it funds the next generation of unfairness.

Dear Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, Leader Thune, and Leader Schumer:

Earlier this year, we wrote urging that you take action on the American Music Fairness Act (S.253/H.R.791), legislation that will require that AM/FM radio companies start paying artists for their music. We are grateful for your attention to ensuring America’s recording artists are finally paid for use of our work.

As you may know, some members of Congress are currently seeking to pass legislation that will require every new vehicle manufactured in the United States come pre-installed with AM radio. The passage of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (S.315/H.R.979) would mark another major windfall for the corporate radio industry that makes $13.6 billion each year in advertising revenue while refusing to compensate the performers whose songs play 240 million times each year on AM radio stations. Every year, recording artists lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties in the U.S. and abroad because of this hundred-year-old loophole.

This is wrong. In the United States of America, every person deserves to be paid for the use of their work. But because of the power held by giant radio corporations in Washington, artists, both big and small, continue to be overlooked, even as every other music delivery platform, including streaming services and satellite radio, pays both the songwriter and performer.

We are asking today that you insist that any legislation that includes the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act also include the American Music Fairness Act. We do not oppose terrestrial radio. In fact, we appreciate the role that radio has played in our careers and within society, but the 100-year-old argument of promotion that radio continues to hide behind does not ring true in 2025.

When you save the radio industry by mandating its technology remain in cars, we ask that you save the musician too and allow us to be paid fairly when our music is played.

Thank you again for your consideration of this much-needed legislation.

Sincerely,

Barry Manilow

Boyz II Men

Carole King

Cyndi Lauper

Debbie Gibson

Def Leppard

Gloria Gaynor

Kool and the Gang

Lee Ann Womack

Lil Jon

Mike Love

Nancy Wilson

Peter Frampton

Sammy Hagar

Smokey Robinson

TLC

by Trichordist Editor

“You don’t need to train on novels and pop songs to get the benefits of AI in science” @ednewtonrex

You Don’t Need to Steal Art to Cure Cancer: Why Ed Newton-Rex Is Right About AI and Copyright

Ed Newton-Rex said the quiet truth out loud: you don’t need to scrape the world’s creative works to build AI that saves lives. Or even beat the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s a myth that AI “has to” ingest novels and pop lyrics to learn language. Models acquire syntax, semantics, and pragmatics from any large, diverse corpus of natural language. That includes transcribed speech, forums, technical manuals, government documents, Wikipedia, scientific papers, and licensed conversational data. Speech systems learn from audio–text pairs, not necessarily fiction; text models learn distributional patterns wherever language appears. Of course, literary works can enrich style, but they’re not necessary for competence: instruction tuning, dialogue data, and domain corpora yield fluent models without raiding copyrighted art. In short, creative literature is optional seasoning, not the core ingredient for teaching machines to “speak.”

Google’s new cancer-therapy paper proves the point. Their model wasn’t trained on novels, lyrics, or paintings. It was trained responsibly on scientific data. And yet it achieved real, measurable progress in biomedical research. That simple fact dismantles one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent myths: that copyright is somehow an obstacle to innovation.

You don’t need to train on Joni Mitchell to discover a new gene pathway. You don’t need to ingest John Coltrane to find a drug target. AI used for science can thrive within the guardrails of copyright because science itself already has its own open-data ecosystems—peer-reviewed, licensed, and transparent.

The companies like Anthropic and Meta insisting that “fair use” covers mass ingestion of stolen creative works aren’t curing diseases; they’re training entertainment engines. They’re ripping off artists’ livelihoods to make commercial chatbots, story generators, and synthetic-voice platforms designed to compete against the very creators whose works they exploited. That’s not innovation—it’s market capture through appropriation.

They do it for reasons old as time—they do it for the money.

The ethical divide is clear:

  • AI for discovery builds on licensed scientific data.
  • AI for mimicry plunders culture to sell imitation.

We should celebrate the first and regulate the second. Upholding copyright and requiring provenance disclosures doesn’t hinder progress—it restores integrity. The same society that applauds AI in medical breakthroughs can also insist that creative industries remain human-centered and law-abiding. Civil-military fusion doesn’t imply that there’s only two ingredients in the gumbo of life.

If Google can advance cancer research without stealing art, so can everyone else and so can Google keep different rules for the entertainment side of their business or investment portfolio. The choice isn’t between curing cancer and protecting artists—it’s between honesty and opportunism. The repeated whinging of AI labs about “because China” would be a lot more believable if they used their political influence to get the CCP to release Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai from stir. We can join Jimmy and his amazingly brave son Sebastian and say “because China”, too. #FreeJimmyLai

by Trichordist

Hey Budweiser, You Give Beer a Bad Name

In a world where zero royalties becomes a brag, and one second of music is one second too far.

Let me set the stage: Cannes Lions is the annual eurotrash…to coin a phrase…circular self-congratulatory hype fest at which the biggest brands and ad agencies in the world if not the Solar System spend unreal amounts of money telling each other how wonderful they are. Kind of like HITS Magazine goes to Cannes but with a real budget. And of course the world’s biggest ad platform–guess who–has a major presence there among the bling and yachts of the elites tied up in Yachtville by the Sea. And of course they give each other prizes, and long-time readers know how much we love a good prize, Nyan Cat wise.

Enter the King of Swill, the mind-numbingly stupid Budweiser marketing department. Or as they say in Cannes, Le roi de la bibine.

Credit where it’s due: British Bud-hater and our friend Chris Cooke at CMU flagged this jaw-dropper from Cannes Lions, where Budweiser took home the Grand Prix for its “One‑Second Ad” campaign—a series of ultra-short TikTok clips that featured the one second of hooks from iconic songs. The gimmick? Tease the audience just long enough to trigger nostalgia, then let the internet do the rest. The beer is offensive enough to any right-thinking Englishman, but the theft? Ooh la la.

Cannes Clown

Budweiser’s award-winning brag? “Zero ads were skipped. $0 spent on music right$.” Yes, that’s correct–“right$”.

That quote should hang in a museum of creative disinformation.

There’s an old copyright myth known as the “7‑second rule”—the idea that using a short snippet of a song (usually under 7 seconds) doesn’t require a license. It’s pure urban legend. No court has ever upheld such a rule, but it sticks around because music users desperately want it to be true. Budweiser didn’t just flirt with the myth—it took the myth on a date to Short Attention Span Theater, built an ad campaign around it, and walked away with the biggest prize in advertising to the cheers of Googlers everywhere.

When Theft from artists Becomes a Business Model–again

But maybe this kind of stunt shouldn’t come as a surprise. When the richest corporations in commercial history are openly scraping, mimicking, and monetizing millions of copyrighted works to train AI models—without permission and without payment—and so far getting away with it, it sends a signal. A signal that says: “This isn’t theft, it’s innovation.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. Give them a prize.

So of course Budweiser’s corporate brethren start thinking: “Me too.”

As Austin songwriter Guy Forsyth wrote in Long Long Time, “Americans are freedom-loving people, and nothing says freedom like getting away with it.” That lyric, in this context, resonates like a manifesto for scumbags.

The Immorality of Virality

For artists and the musicians and vocalists who created the value that Budweiser is extracting, the campaign’s success is a masterclass in bad precedent. It’s one thing to misunderstand copyright; it’s another to market that misunderstanding as a feature. When global brands publicly celebrate not paying for music–in Cannes, of all places—the very tone-deaf foundation of their ad’s emotional resonance sends a corrosive signal to the entire creative economy. And, frankly, to fans.

Oops!… I Did It Again, bragged Budweiser, proudly skipping royalties like it’s Free Fallin’, hoping no one notices they’re just Smooth Criminals playing Cheap Thrills with other people’s work. It’s not Without Me—it’s without paying anyone—because apparently Money for Nothing is still the vibe, and The Sound of Silence is what they expect from artists they’ve ghosted.

Because make no mistake: even one second of a recording can be legally actionable particularly when the intentional infringing conspiracy gets a freaking award for doing it. That’s not just law—it’s basic respect, which is kind of the same thing. Which makes Budweiser’s campaign less of a legal grey area and more of a cultural red flag with a bunch of zeros. Meaning the ultimate jury award from a real jury, not a Cannes jury.

This is the immorality of virality: weaponizing cultural shorthand to score branding points, while erasing the very artists who make those moments recognizable. When the applause dies down in Yachtville, what’s left is a case study in how to win by stealing — not creating.

by theinvisiblestagehand

A New Twist in the AM Radio Debate: Why Tying AM Mandates to AMFA Is a Game-Changer #IRespectMusic

The latest twist in the long-running AM radio saga comes from a new alliance: cars and music. Automaker trade groups Alliance for Automotive Innovation, Consumer Technology Association, and Zero Emission Transportation Association are shoulder to shoulder with the musicFIRST Coalition and SoundExchange in urging Congress to link the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” with the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA). If we’re going to mandate AM radios be placed in new cars then music played on those radios should pay the people who made that music. It’s unfair and fundamentally inconsistent to require one without the other, so broadcasters should pay artists.

What Is the American Music Fairness Act?

If you haven’t run across it yet, AMFA is bipartisan legislation sponsored by our champion Senator Marsha Blackburn in the Senate and our long-time ally Rep. Darrell Issa in the House of Representatives that would finally require AM/FM radio stations to pay performance royalties to recording artists and performers when their recordings are played over the air. Currently, the U.S. remains the only democracy that allows terrestrial radio to make billions from music without compensating performers.

Why Artists Get Left Out

As incredible as it may seem, under U.S. copyright law, terrestrial radio must pay songwriters and publishers—but not performers or sound recording rights holders. That means backup singers, session musicians, and producers receive zero compensation, even when their work drives–literally–billions in broadcast revenue. This is what allows the National Association of Broadcasters shillery to claim “we pay for music” and then try to pit artists against songwriters. That dog won’t hunt, but that never stops them from trying.

The musicFIRST Coalition, including SoundExchange and tons of artists and creators, has been front and center pushing Congress to close this loophole for years and we have been right there with them along with our friend Blake Morgan and his #IRespectMusic campaign.

 

“Mandating AM radio without addressing the performance royalty issue would perpetuate an inequity that denies hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to countless recording artists every year. Congress should not pass a mandate for radio without ensuring appropriate royalties for artists… They deserve to have their hard work respected and valued with fair compensation — like they receive in every other industrialized country.”
—SoundExchange CEO Michael Huppe

The Math on AMFA

  • U.S. radio plays over 240 million songs annually without compensating performers
  • The music industry could gain an estimated $200–300 million annually if Americans were paid for domestic and foreign broadcast plays 
  • Aligns U.S. copyright with global norms—terrestrial radio already pays performers in virtually every other developed nation.

What is to be done

If Congress is going to mandate AM radio in every car, it can’t ignore the rights of the very artists who create the content. By demanding performance royalties through AMFA, we can preserve public safety benefits while ensuring creators are paid for their work. This is a rare chance for Congress to get it right—fairness and infrastructure can go hand-in-hand.

If you believe artists deserve fairness when their music plays on the radio, now is the time to act:

  1. Sign the letter to Congress. The musicFIRST Action Center has made it easy—just a few clicks to add your name. 
  2. Call your Senator and Representative and tell them to support both:
    • American Music Fairness Act (H.R. 861 / S. 326)
    • AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act—(S. 315 / H.R. 979–but only inclusive of performance royalties
  3. Spread the word on social media with tags like #PassAMFA, #FairPayForArtists, #IRespectMusic

by Trichordist Editor