WASHINGTON — While U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch was making headlines for “accidentally” bumping into former President Bill Clinton, whose wife — you may have heard — was under FBI investigation, the Lynch-led Department of Justice quietly decided to deliver a crushing blow to America’s songwriters, including those who are continuing to build Alabama’s flourishing artist community.
Understanding the DOJ’s decision first requires some background information on how songwriters are paid.
Performing Rights Organizations (PROs), most notably BMI and ASCAP, issue “licenses” to radio stations and businesses who want to play songs in public. The PROs then collect “royalties” from those entities and pay songwriters.
Back in the early 1940s the U.S. government decided to force PROs to license every song in their catalog at a fixed rate. This decision was sold as an effort to cut down on anti-trust abuses in the music industry.
At the time of this “consent decree,” LP records had not even been invented. Flash forward seven decades and music is being consumed in ways that no one — much less the government — could have imagined, but the laws have not been updated. As a result, you have situations like Kevin Kadish’s.
Kadish wrote “All About That Bass,” made famous by Meghan Trainor. The song was streamed almost 200 million times, but he claims he only made $5,679.
“For a song like ‘All About That Bass,’ that I wrote, which had 178 million streams,” Kadish began, “I mean $5,679? That’s my share. That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and number one in 78 countries. But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?”
The music streaming business — led by tech companies like Spotify, Pandora, Apple and Google — has grown to the point that it now accounts for the majority of the income at some major record labels, but artists have complained they are not sharing in the growth.
As a result, some A-List stars like Taylor Swift have refused to allow their songs to be streamed until an artist-friendly compensation structure is put in place.
In a second blow to songwriters, the DOJ also called for so-called “100% licensing.”
Billboard, a music industry trade publication that called the order “baffling,” explains:
The DoJ has sent a letter to the two performance rights societies… telling them that on “split works” songs — songs written by multiple writers — any writer or rights holder can issue a license for 100 percent of the song. In other words, the long-established industry practice of each rights owner greenlighting their particular portion of a song in order to establish a license — also known as fractional licensing — may no longer be allowed.
The U.S. Copyright Office responded to the DOJ order saying it “presents a host of legal and policy concerns.”
Alabama is home to a thriving artist community that started decades ago in the Muscle Shoals area of the state. Hundreds of hits songs have been written or recorded in the Yellowhammer State, and a new generation of artists is now taking Alabama’s sound to the world.
Unfortunately the Obama administration’s ruling may make it difficult for even the most successful Alabama songwriters to get paid for their work.
Brittany Hodak of Forbes sums up the songwriters’ concerns:
Don McLean forever memorialized Feb. 3, 1959—the date of the plane crash killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson—as “the Day the Music Died” in his song “American Pie.” If you ask most songwriters or music creators, June 30, 2016—the date the Dept. of Justice ruled on music licensing consent decrees—may go down in history as “the day the music rolled over in its grave.”
