Americans are freedom loving people and nothing says freedom like getting away with it.

Long Long Time, written by Guy Forsyth

Longtime PRO opponent Rep. Sensenbrenner introduced a bill entitled “The Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act“, a piece of work that is Dickensian in its cruelty, bringing a whole new meaning to either “newspeak” or “draconian,” take your pick.  It’s rare that the Congress can accomplish the hat trick of an interference with private contracts, an unconstitutional taking and an international trade treaty violation all in one bill.  But I guess practice makes perfect.  And since the MIC Coalition gave the bill a rousing cheer followed by a heaping serving of astroturf, we should not be surprised.  (Read the bill here.)

While this legislation currently applies only to songs and sound recordings, other creators should not feel that they’ve dodged…

[Editor Charlie sez: This post first appeared in the MusicTechPolicy Monthly Newsletter. Subscribe by signing up for MTP by email.]

As we have reported a number of times this year, Amazon, Spotify, Google, Pandora, iHeart, Loudr and others are taking advantage of the compulsory license loophole that allows these companies to file tens of millions of address unknown “notices of intention” to rely on the compulsory license for songs in the Copyright Act.  Perhaps more remarkable is that Amazon’s head of music, the eponymous Steve Boom, managed to make it through his entire Alexa demo at the NMPA Annual Meeting keynote without ever mentioning Amazon’s dedication to the mass NOI loophole and its negative effects for the songwriters and publishers listening to his demo.

If a music user like Amazon wants to use the song compulsory license but can’t find the song owner in the public records of the Copyright…

At MIDiA Research we are currently in the final stages of producing the update to our annual landmark report: The State Of The Streaming Nation, a report which compiles every streaming market data point you could possibly need.

In advance of its release in June we want to give you a sneak peak into a couple of the key areas of focus: streaming app usage and major label streaming revenue.

Subscriber numbers only tell part of the streaming story. They are solid indicators of commercial success, but can often obscure how well a service is doing in terms of engaging its user base. That’s why we track the main music services’ active user bases every quarter. But rather than tracking Monthly Active Users (MAUs), we track Weekly Active Users (WAUs). The MAU metric is past its sell by date. In today’s always on, increasingly mobile digital landscape, doing something just…

We hate to say we told ya so, but… Below is our post from September 2015. Two years ago we predicted the inevitable truth of the all you can eat Spotify subcription model. Like many of our predictionsand proposals (example; windowing titles) we’ve had to wait for the industry to catch up to us. Today, two years later, Digital Music News confirms our prediction.

Read the report from Digital Music News by clicking the headline link here.

Exclusive Report: Spotify Artist Payments Are Declining In 2017, Data Shows | Digital Music News

Our original post from 2015 is below…

Spotify Per Play Rates Continue to Drop (.00408) … More Free Users = Less Money Per Stream #gettherateright

Down, down, down it goes, where it stops nobody knows… The monthly average rate per play on Spotify is currently .00408 for master rights holders.

48 Months of Spotify Streaming Rates…