Low Pay For Online Streaming Hurts Songwriters, Nashville Musician Tells U.S. Senators

A Nashville musician told U.S. lawmakers Tuesday that songwriters should be paid more for their music that’s streamed online, part of a complex discussion about the cost of music in the digital age.

The Senate hearing focused on the role of ASCAP and BMI, two huge publishing rights organizations with offices in Nashville. They collect royalties for songwriters when their songs are played — whether it’s on the radio, at a live show or streamed online, such as on Pandora or Spotify. 

The federal government has been regulating the two music giants heavily for decades. The regulations are intended to limit their power to collude and set royalties rates too high. According to testimony from the Senate hearing, ASCAP and BMI combined make up 90 percent of the publishing rights industry.

But Lee Thomas Miller, president of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, said the current regulations are keeping digital streaming royalties too low. This hurt songwriters because royalties are their main source of income.
 

“We do not tour. We do not sell t-shirts,” he said. “We write songs.”

A song that is played one million times on the radio is quite lucrative, Miller said, but tens of millions of plays on streaming sites is only worth a few thousand dollars.

“That’s what we can’t emphasize enough: How is that fair?” he said.

Pandora’s vice-president of business affairs responded to Miller’s comment at the hearing, saying 
plays on terrestrial radio have a far wider audience than on the Internet, when a song is usually heard by one person at a time.

“If you wanted to do a real apples-to-apples comparison,” said Chris Harrison, “to
 reach a million people on, for example, Z100, the largest radio station in New York City, you’d only have to play that song 16 times.”

Representatives from ASCAP, a Christian broadcast company, a music publisher and an intellectual property nonprofit also testified at the hearing about the cost of music.

Meanwhile, lawmakers recently introduced the
Songwriters Equity Act, which advocates say would also help pay songwriters a fair market value for their work.