In this short video, Gwendolyn Seale and Artist Rights Institute Director Chris Castle preview “The 39 Steps,” a Symposium V panel asking whether Section 115’s complex streaming mechanical formula should give way to a fixed per-stream penny rate with a COLA.
Gwen joins fellow attorneys Tim Kappel and Shannon Sorensen—all three represent clients before the Copyright Royalty Board in Phonorecords V. ARI Director and UGA professor David C. Lowery moderates. David teaches at the Terry College of Business Music Certificate program. He led the class action against Spotify over nonpayment of streaming mechanical royalties and is a class representative in the Isbell v. Suno class action.
Join us October 19, 2026, at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, for Artist Rights Symposium V hosted by Terry College of Business and the UGA School of Policy and International Affairs.
We’re pleased to announce that the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs has joined the Artist Rights Institute and UGA’s Music Business Certificate Program at Terry College as a sponsor of the fifth annual Artist Rights Symposium, October 19, 2026, in Athens, Georgia.
The addition of SPIA is especially timely. This year’s Symposium reaches beyond traditional music-industry issues to examine the broader public-policy consequences of artificial intelligence—from the massive data centers, energy infrastructure, and local communities supporting AI development to the legal and policy questions surrounding artist consent, identity, compensation, and the use of creative work.
Bringing together music business, law, public policy, artists, advocates, and policymakers is exactly what this moment requires.
Artist Rights Symposium V October 19, 2026 — Athens, Georgia Speakers and additional program details coming soon.
The American Music Fairness Act is still alive in the 119th Congress in the post-Labor Day political season, and with Congress heading toward the final stretch of the year, it is worth remembering both what the bill actually does and why it matters.
The basic proposition behind AMFA is remarkably simple: when terrestrial radio uses a sound recording to make money, the people who made the recording should be paid. That is not currently the law in the United States, and that’s what the #I Respect Music campaign is all about.
Songwriters and music publishers receive public-performance royalties when AM/FM radio plays a song. But the recording artists, background singers, session musicians and owners of the sound recording receive nothing for the terrestrial performance of that recording. Digital radio services, by contrast, already pay sound-recording performance royalties.
AMFA—S. 326 in the Senate and H.R. 861 in the House—would finally close that anomaly by extending the Section 106(6) sound-recording performance right to terrestrial audio transmissions and bringing AM/FM broadcasts within the Section 114 statutory licensing system.
One of the more persistent arguments against AMFA is that a new royalty would threaten small and community broadcasters. Congress has addressed that concern rather directly.
Under S. 326, a qualifying station with less than $100,000 in annual revenue would pay $10 per year. Qualifying public broadcasters with revenues between $100,000 and $1.5 million would pay $100 per year, while other qualifying stations in that range would pay $500. Those protections are limited to genuinely smaller operations; among other requirements, the station’s owner and affiliated entities must have aggregate revenues below $10 million. Let’s be real; that’s a fair deal for small broadcasters, come on.
For everyone else, the Copyright Royalty Judges would establish the rate. And Congress expressly tells the judges that they can consider radio’s much-invoked “exposure” value when determining that rate. (I’m so sure they’ll net out the indie payments, but hush my mouth.)
In other words, “radio promotes records” is not ignored by AMFA. It becomes an economic proposition that can be tested in an actual rate-setting proceeding rather than a vague slogan chanted by NAB lobbyists in sack cloth and ashes justifying a permanent entitlement for large broadcasters to use recordings for free.
There is another important feature of AMFA that deserves considerably more attention. The bill plugs a potential direct-licensing loophole. If a copyright owner directly licenses transmissions that otherwise could have been made under the Section 114 statutory license, the broadcaster doesn’t get to use that deal to contract the performers out of their statutory share. The transmitting entity must pay 50 percent of the applicable direct-license royalties to SoundExchange (the collective Congress designated to distribute Section 114 royalties), which then distributes the money according to the statutory performer allocations.
That protection is important. It means AMFA isn’t merely creating another revenue stream payable to record companies with the hope that something eventually trickles through an artist’s recording agreement around recoupment in the royalty waterfall. The legislation deliberately preserves a statutory payment path for featured and nonfeatured performers.
That’s an important piece of artist protection and one of the better features of the bill.
The reality is that AMFA is not sitting on the President’s desk. Neither chamber has reported the bill so far, and that’s the reality in the cold light of dawn. But— look at the Senate sponsorship.
S. 326 is led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and now has Thom Tillis (R-NC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) aboard. That is a 3–3 Republican/Democratic lineup, and importantly, Tillis chairs the Senate Judiciary Intellectual Property Subcommittee while Schiff is its ranking member.
That’s only six senators including the sponsor, so this is certainly not a 60-vote whip count. But six names don’t tell the whole story. Having the chairman and ranking member of the relevant subcommittee supporting the legislation is rather different from having six random cosponsors.
The Senate also did something important in December: it held an actual IP Subcommittee hearing on terrestrial performance rights, with Gene Simmons and SoundExchange President Michael Huppe making the case for performers and broadcasters presenting the opposing view. And when Gene Simmons makes the case before Congress (“the word ‘if’ is for losers….”) and in his Washington Post op-ed, that’s a sight to behold and is must-see TV if you haven’t watched it.
AMFA support in the House of Representatives is also bipartisan. H.R. 861 is sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), with support that crosses the aisle, including our long-time supporters Jerry Nadler and Ted Lieu. The House bill has accumulated additional cosponsors since introduction, although it likewise has not yet been reported from Judiciary.
So call the whip count what it is: not enough yet, but unusually well positioned institutionally for a music bill that hasn’t moved through committee. And let’s be clear—fighting the National Association of Broadcasters is tough work, right up there with the Augean Stables and Sisyphus. Although closer to the Stables in our opinion.
That brings us to the calendar. There isn’t much legislative runway remaining in the 119th Congress, and AMFA still faces formidable opposition from the broadcast lobby. A conventional committee-to-floor path is getting increasingly difficult. But Congress will return after the November elections, and that is where things could get interesting before January 3, 2027 when unpasted bills die.
Music legislation has a history of moving when bipartisan agreement finally intersects with a legislative vehicle. The Music Modernization Act itself ultimately became a package containing several pieces of music legislation and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
AMFA now has something it did not have at the beginning of this Congress: a Senate hearing, bipartisan support from the leadership of the relevant IP subcommittee, bipartisan sponsorship in both chambers, and a legislative record establishing both the case for paying performers and the protections afforded small broadcasters.
While that doesn’t guarantee anything, it does make AMFA a plausible candidate for a lame-duck legislative vehicle if the right copyright, intellectual-property or broader year-end package starts moving. Stranger things have happened.
And this is one of those issues where Congress has been “studying” the problem for a very long time. As SoundExchange CEO Mike Huppe reminded the Senate last December, the Senate Judiciary Committee actually reported the predecessor Performance Rights Act in 2009. It never reached the floor.
Seventeen years later, the underlying inequity is still the law: American radio broadcasters can build a commercial business around recorded performances without paying the performers for those performances. Digital services pay. Broadcasters in most other developed music markets pay. American terrestrial radio does not. Artists still die of exposure.
The American Music Fairness Act would finally change that.
Six Senate sponsors isn’t 60 votes. But with Blackburn, Tillis, Hagerty, Padilla, Booker and Schiff already aboard—and Tillis and Schiff occupying the two key positions on the IP Subcommittee—there may be enough bipartisan infrastructure here to keep watching very closely as Congress heads toward the lame duck.
Sometimes the last few weeks of a Congress are when supporters of legislation that has been waiting years finally ride Justice across the finish line.
It’s that time again. It’s no secret that we are not fans of the NMPA’s “quick and cheap” settlement on the statutory mechanicl license for physical and downloads which in its own way is essentially “take this eat that” freeze with no explanation that just extends the rates we fought for in the last rate setting. (David, Helienne and Blake filed a joint comment that we’ll get to posting in coming days.). Hard as it may be to believe, there’s no real record to support the NMPA settlement aside from “quick and cheap” and “we’re big.” Don’t think that that one appears in the rules anywhere.
But it turns out we are far from being the only ones who managed to achieve escape velocity from the influence of NMPA. Today we’re highlighting another submission in the Phonorecords V Subpart B proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Board.
In these comments, Kevin M. Casini and Kaila C. Coleman argue that the proposed settlement preserves inflation adjustments but does not reconsider whether the underlying 12¢ statutory mechanical royalty remains an appropriate benchmark for the 2028–2032 rate period. They contend that changes in the music marketplace—including the resurgence of vinyl, increased catalog values, and the continuing importance of physical formats for many independent writers—warrant closer examination.
One passage that stood out:
“The Board’s obligation extends beyond determining whether a proposed settlement has support among major industry participants. The Board must determine whether the resulting rates are fair, reasonable, and consistent with the objectives of the Copyright Act.”
As always, we’re featuring these comments to encourage readers to review the arguments being presented to the Copyright Royalty Judges.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
When White House AI Czar David Sacks tweets confidently that “there will be no federal bailout for AI” because “five major frontier model companies” will simply replace each other, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. He is speaking as a venture capitalist with overlapping financial ties to the very AI companies now engaged in the most circular investment structure Silicon Valley has engineered since the dot-com bubble—but on a scale measured not in millions or even billions, but in trillions.
Sacks is a PayPal alumnus turned political-tech kingmaker who has positioned himself at the intersection of public policy and private AI investment. His recent stint as a Special Government Employee to the federal government raised eyebrows precisely because of this dual role. Yet he now frames the AI sector as a robust ecosystem that can absorb firm-level failure without systemic consequence.
The numbers say otherwise. The diagram circulating in the X-thread exposes the real structure: mutually dependent investments tied together through cross-equity stakes, GPU pre-purchases, cloud-compute lock-ins, and stock-option-backed revenue games. So Microsoft invests in OpenAI; OpenAI pays Microsoft for cloud resources; Microsoft books the revenue and inflates its stake OpenAI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI buys tens of billions in Nvidia chips; Nvidia’s valuation inflates; and that valuation becomes the collateral propping up the entire sector. Oracle buys Nvidia chips; OpenAI signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle; Oracle books the upside. Every player’s “growth” relies on every other player’s spending.
This is not competition. It is a closed liquidity loop. And it’s a repeat of the dot-bomb “carriage” deals that contributed to the stock market crash in 2000.
And underlying all of it is the real endgame: a frantic rush to secure taxpayer-funded backstops—through federal energy deals, subsidized data-center access, CHIPS-style grants, or Department of Energy land leases—to pay for the staggering infrastructure costs required to keep this circularity spinning. The singularity may be speculative, but the push for a public subsidy to sustain it is very real.
Call it what it is: an industry searching for a government-sized safety net while insisting it doesn’t need one.
In the meantime, the circular investing game serves another purpose: it manufactures sky-high paper valuations that can be recycled into legal war chests. Those inflated asset values are now being used to bankroll litigation and lobbying campaigns aimed at rewriting copyright, fair use, and publicity law so that AI firms can keep strip-mining culture without paying for it.
The same feedback loop that props up their stock prices is funding the effort to devalue the work of every writer, musician, actor, and visual artist on the planet—and to lock that extraction in as a permanent feature of the digital economy.
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:
Read the open letter below.
Share it with your representatives.
Tag them on social media with #AMFA and #IRespectMusic.
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.
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