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This year, in communities all across America, bands will strike up “God Bless the U.S.A.” and crowds will rise to their feet. It will happen at firework shows and small-town parades, at ballgames and backyard cookouts, as our country marks 250 years.
I wrote that song more than 40 years ago on a tour bus, between shows, running 300 dates a year. Since then, I’ve performed it in every state of our union and all across the globe for our troops who are serving a long way from home. I have never once gotten tired of it.
But here is something most people do not know. Every time an AM/FM radio station plays that recording, the station makes money, but the artists and musicians who recorded it make nothing. Not me or the other musicians who performed it with me. A radio company can broadcast “God Bless the U.S.A.” a thousand times, sell advertising against every play, and never pay the people who made it. That is not because of some deal we signed away. It’s because of a loophole in the law that Congress has left open for about a hundred years.
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I love radio. Radio has been part of my life and my career for as long as I can remember. This is not about punishing local stations or silencing the voices that connect communities. It is about asking the biggest broadcast companies in America to follow the same basic principle every other platform already follows: when you use music to make money, the people who made that music deserve to share in it.
This is a basic American idea: when someone’s work creates value, they should be paid fairly for it.
When a farmer grows a crop, it’s his to sell. When a factory turns out a product, the people who built it get paid. A recording should be no different.
The men and women who make a recording create real value in that recording. But AM/FM radio has had a free pass since the early days of broadcasting, and the biggest broadcasting corporations in the country still lean on it today, drawing huge audiences off other people’s work, pulling in billions in advertising, and leaving performers high and dry.
That’s not a free market. It’s a government favor handed to one industry and paid for by working musicians, kept alive all these years because the radio industry’s lobbyists spend millions to ensure Congress doesn’t fix it.
This is not about my royalty check. I am blessed. I’m grateful for the career I’ve had. This is really about session players, studio musicians, and backup singers, people whose names never make the marquee. They come in, do beautiful work, and go home to their families, and they have never seen a dime from AM/FM radio for any of it. They’re working people, and they ought to be paid for the work they do.
The radio companies claim they’re giving us free advertising. A spin on the dial sells records and concert tickets, they say, so we ought to call it square. Even if that were true, it would not give radio a right to use our recordings without compensation. And here is what radio leaves out: every other place that puts my recordings in front of a listener pays for that right. Spotify. SiriusXM. YouTube. Internet radio. Only old-fashioned AM/FM takes our music and plays it for free.
This loophole costs us beyond our borders, too. Because America doesn’t pay performers for radio plays (a fact we hold in common with Cuba, Iran, and North Korea) other countries hold back royalties our artists have already earned, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. And because America doesn’t pay artists, the European Union is now moving to withhold another $287 million annually from our own artists.
There’s a bill in Congress that will fix all that. The American Music Fairness Act is a bipartisan proposal that requires big radio corporations to finally play by the rules. It’s a narrowly-tailored bill, led by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), that allows independent, local broadcasters to play unlimited music for a few dollars each day while the biggest, most powerful radio corporations finally pay what they owe.
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If the American Music Fairness Act becomes law, not only will American broadcasters finally start paying artists, but countries around the world that have withheld royalties because of this loophole will finally start paying artists as well. The EU’s proposal to withhold even more money will be dead on arrival.
This is not a new fight. Forty years ago, Frank Sinatra rallied artists to ask Congress to close the radio loophole, but Congress didn’t listen. I’m intent on finishing the work that Ol’ Blue Eyes started. And I’m grateful that right now we have a President who knows how to get the job done.
In his first term, President Trump signed the Music Modernization Act, which finally got artists paid fairly in the streaming age. The American Music Fairness Act is the part that law left unfinished, and I know that President Trump can be the one to finally get this bill across the finish line after other presidents have failed.
America has always made a plain promise that hard work deserves to be rewarded. That promise is a good part of what we’ll be celebrating this year as our country turns 250. Closing a hundred-year-old loophole that’s left artists unpaid would be a fitting way to honor it, and to finally let the people who recorded America’s soundtrack share in what their work is worth.
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