Washington, D.C. (March 30, 2017) – musicFIRST Executive Director Chris Israel issued the following statement on today’s introduction by Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-New York), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), John Conyers (D-Michigan), Darrell Issa (R-California), Ted Deutch (D-Florida), and Tom Rooney
(R-Florida) of the Fair Play Fair Pay Act:
“We applaud Reps. Nadler, Blackburn, Conyers, Issa, Deutch and Rooney’s bipartisan introduction of the Fair Play Fair Pay Act, an important bill that protects the rights of music creators and benefits the consumers who listen to their songs. Thanks to their leadership we are one step closer to fixing the deeply-flawed system that fails to justly compensate American artists for their hard work.
“This bipartisan legislation, together with recent developments that demonstrate strong support for the performance rights of artists, shows clear momentum for reaching a solution to copyright reform that establishes free market pay for all music creators and technology-neutral rules for music services. The musicFIRST coalition looks forward to engaging with Congress in support of this legislation and on other efforts to level the playing field for artists across music platforms.
To learn more about Fair Play Fair Pay, see here. For more about musicFIRST and the effort to ensure that music artists receive fair compensation for use of their creative property in the music ecosystem, visit www.musicfirstcoalition.org/home.
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Statement from A2IM CEO Richard James Burgess, “It is wonderful news that Representatives Nadler, Blackburn, Conyers, Issa, Deutch and Rooney have re-Introduced the Fair Play Fair Pay Act to right this egregious wrong. Most other countries pay this royalty but for nearly 100 years, the $17bn U.S. radio industry has refused to compensate artists, musicians, singers, and labels for the use of their work upon which radio’s revenues are dependent. This is an unconscionable way to treat the creative community and we hope that this bill corrects the problem.”