NASHVILLE, TN — The Music Modernization Act (MMA) is legislation that recently passed the full House of Representatives 415-0, was unanimously reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is currently being taken up by the full Senate. And there’s a reason the bill has received such overwhelming support in Congress: it is the product of literally years of negotiation between songwriters, music publishers, digital streaming companies, artists, record labels, performing rights societies, broadcasters and more. All stakeholders recognized that the marketplace in which we conduct our business is badly in need of reform, and while the negotiations were hard fought, ultimately all of the groups agreed on a bill that contains the most significant improvements for songwriters in decades.
But now, after years of work reaching an unprecedented agreement, the Blackstone Group, owners of the performing rights society SESAC and it mechanical rights arm The Harry Fox Agency, has proposed sweeping changes that would destroy the MMA and with it, all the benefits that it promises for songwriters.
America’s largest songwriter advocacy organizations, the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and Songwriters of North America (SONA) ask that Blackstone, SESAC and Harry Fox withdraw their proposal and immediately support the Music Modernization Act as drafted.
Our groups participated in carefully crafting a bill that contains historic gains for songwriters and artists and will provide real economic benefits going forward. Among these are:
- A critically needed new streaming mechanical royalty rate standard for songwriters;
- Major changes in the way ASCAP and BMI rate court judges are chosen and how streaming performance royalties are determined;
- A statutory guarantee of streaming royalty payments for artists’ songs recorded prior to 1972;
- A streamlined process for producers and engineers to receive their digital royalties.
And most importantly, the legislation creates a single Music Licensing Collective (MLC) to oversee blanket digital mechanical licenses, collect the money from digital services, track the digital usage of songwriters’ worksand pay them accordingly. As proposed, The MLC will be overseen by a Board of publishers AND songwriters, a huge victory for us. We will have a voice in who collects our money and how they do it. Additionally, it will create a transparent song ownership database, a fair distribution process for unclaimed funds, and will eliminate the devastating government-run mass Notice of Intent (NOI) program. And, it will be paid for by the digital services themselves with no commissions charged to songwriters.
Blackstone, SESAC and Harry Fox have had months to review and suggest changes to this bill, to participate in the process with the rest of the industry in good faith. Their repeated message has been, “this bill is good for songwriters. We are fine with it.” Now at the last minute they are introducing what is essentially a poison pill. And while representatives of Blackstone claim they do not want to kill this landmark bill, what they are suggesting would do just that. If their proposal becomes part of the bill, NSAI and SONA would no longer be able to support the MMA which we’ve worked years to achieve.
Crucially, there is nothing in the current MMA legislation that precludes Harry Fox from applying to the MLC Board to provide the necessary services as a vendor, but they don’t want to have to compete for the job. Rather, in an act of greed and callous disregard for American songwriters and recording artists, they are using their financial and political muscle for their own narrow corporate self-interest.
The right thing to do would be for Blackstone, SESAC and Harry Fox to abandon any changes that would disintegrate support for the Music Modernization Act from an unprecedented collection of stakeholders and immediately call for its swift passage. Otherwise, SESAC, Harry Fox Agency and Blackstone will bear responsibility for stopping the most important songwriter legislation in decades.