The Music Modernization Act was signed in 2018 to update the antiquated copyright laws of music distribution. Previous laws had not caught up to the reality of the capabilities of the Internet and streaming services. Therefore, artists and songwriters did not have adequate protection for their intellectual property and recordings being taken advantage of by these platforms. These services pay little, if any, royalties based on streams, which could come out to less than half a cent per stream. The Trump Administration signed the MMA to provide an up to date framework for artists to use as protection (Hess, 2019). Despite these new measures of protection, there is still discrepancy over the effectiveness of the act. While there has been plenty of documentation of the supposed benefits and balancing of the act (Abdo & Abdo, 2019), there is also a counterargument that it is not as powerful as people hoped it would be. A perspective that leans in this more critical lens is an article by Lydia Loren in the Boston University Law Review. She makes the argument that the act “increases the disparity in treatment between musical work copyright owners and sound recording copyright owners” (Loren, 2019).
Dr. Dr. Christopher Cotropia, director of the University of Richmond School of Law’s Intellectual Property Institute, provided us with some expert insights on this often vague and confusing world of copyright law and the intersection of art and industry. In essence, his perspective is that MMA is not as effective as people make it out to be, and that the role of “law is like this rule set that might control the boundaries of the game but what’s really important is what’s happening in the center of it.” This “center” being the external societal norms and pressures applied by big name artists like Taylor Swift and Eminem. In terms of Spotify’s engagement in this space, he explains that “I have some sympathy for Spotify in that it’s a very hard endeavor to venture into. You do get concerned about them not being subject to pressures of an individual artist of some kind.” We spoke at length about the artist vs business narrative and how those in the industry thought the MMA would release them from the oppression of labels. In reality, the act clarifies the copyright procedure and claiming to royalties, however, Dr. Cotropia says that it “really might not do anything practically for us as consumers, for the streaming services, quite frankly for the artists, which is kind of weird since it’s just a big amendment and addition to the copyright act.”