Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet represents California’s 48th Congressional District.
Later today on the Nashville, TN campus of Belmont University, I’ll convene a field hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. The hearing won’t just take place in Music City, USA but five years after Congress achieved that rarest of things: A consensus solution that recognized the rights of musical artists and created a way they could be compensated fairly by publishers.
It may be hard for some to believe, but at the time we crafted this legislation, the music industry and other content owners were being crushed by widespread piracy and an inability to monetize the value of musical creativity.
And the numbers don’t lie. According to data collected by the Recording Industry Association of America, all recorded music revenues fell from $14.6 billion in 1999 to only $6.7 billion in 2015.
Things needed to change. Some important developments came from the private sector as sales of CDs and digital downloads made way for new models brought forward by paid and ad-supported music streaming. But this created new issues as older laws and institutions performed poorly in facilitating the kind of efficient and effective licensing that digital commerce requires that resulted in gaps in properly compensating music creators.
The Music Modernization Act (MMA) was Congress’...
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