[branksy]

From Wikipedia: The bills in both House and Senate had bipartisan support, as well as strong support from numerous music industry groups representing musicians, producers, and publishers, as well as from digital streaming media services and related industry groups.

Notably missing from the list are musicians themselves (who are the "groups representing them"?) and consumers.

Is this actually a good thing? Will it lead to greater income for the majority of musicians (as opposed to the top 0.1%?). Will it end up raising prices on Spotify or making it harder for new streaming competitors to enter the market?

[Bartweiss]

The support list definitely put my hackles up, as did the name. It's not quite "The Patriot Act", but it's in that "embarrassing to oppose the name" vein. To my surprise, it actually seems fine. The lack of representation for artists looks like a product of the law's main features not impacting active performers. The law has four distinct features, none of which have a significant impact on "some up-and-coming band played a song and wants to get paid".

1. It establishes a non-profit agency to track mechanical license holders of works, and allows streaming services to pay license fees into that agency, which will pass them along. This sounds like it might have bad effects, but in practice it's apparently an attempt to fix the problem of "Spotify can't offer this song because they can't find who they need to pay".

Importantly, 'mechanical license' means "music and words", so this will track who owns Happy Birthday, but not change anything about how Spotify pays performers over "the song as we wrote and performed it". And since mechanical licensing is already compulsory, the fees can go to a clearinghouse without any need to negotiate a price.

2. It extends federal copyright laws to pre-1972 music. This will undoubtedly help some people and hurt others, but it mostly serves to clear out a rat's nest of state laws. Some much older works will enter public domain in 3 years, newer stuff will receive the usual 95 year copyright window.

3. Guarantees a portion of mechanical license fees to producers/engineers/etc who played a creative role in the production. Apparently not very controversial.

4. Fixes some jurisdictional weirdness with royalty rate disputes by spreading the cases across more judges.

Mostly this looks like it fixes one big liability issue ("wait, who do we pay?") and several issues with existing laws, and it looks like artists are indifferent because the situation for people who actually perform a song is unaffected. I'm pleasantly surprised.

[creaghpatr]

>Intended to update music copyright law for the digital era, H.R. 1551 (formally the “Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act”) accomplishes three key things: making sure songwriters and artists receive royalties on songs recorded before 1972; allocating royalties for music producers; and updating licensing and royalty rules for streaming services to pay rights-holders in a more streamlined fashion, via a new, independent entity. Under the act, many music creators will have a more reliable way of collecting the money that they’re due.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/trump-signs-mu...

[weliketocode]

I have the same concerns.

I'm especially suspicious of anything with seemingly unanimous support.