We Must Value The Music

However… While acknowledging the industry’s growth in 2016, RIAA Chairman & CEO Cary Sherman penned an online commentary that continues to shine a light on what he feels is an inequitable royalty system, calling out YouTube in particular, as he said, “The unfortunate reality is that we have achieved this modest success in spite of our current music licensing and copyright laws, not because of them. That’s not the way it should be. For example, it makes no sense that it takes a thousand on-demand streams of a song for creators to earn $1 on YouTube, while services like Apple and Spotify pay creators $7 or more for those same streams. Why does this happen? Because a platform like YouTube wrongly exploits legal loopholes to pay creators at rates well below the true value of music while other digital services  —  including many new and small innovators  —  cannot. It may be the same song requested by the user, on the same device, but the payouts differ enormously because of an unfair and out-of-date legal regime.”

To that end, Sherman reports that 16 music organizations (A2IM, AFM, AMA, CMPA, CMTA, GMR, Living Legends Foundation, MMF-US, NMPA, NSAI, Recording Academy, R&B Foundation, RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, SESAC, SoundExchange) representing artists, songwriters, record labels, publishers and more have launched www.ValueTheMusic.com, described as “a new website to inform policymakers and fans throughout the world about laws enacted in the dial-up era that undermine the modern Internet music marketplace.”