In an obvious try to undercut Taylor Swift’s potential affect on the presidential election later this 12 months, former president Donald Trump issued a press release on his Fact Social platform Sunday claiming credit score for the 2018 Music Modernization Act and stating, with out proof, that Swift wouldn’t endorse President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
Within the put up, Trump claimed: “I signed and was answerable for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all different Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do something for Taylor, and by no means will. There’s no approach she may endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President within the Historical past of our Nation, and be disloyal to the person who made her a lot cash. In addition to that, I like her boyfriend, Travis, regardless that he could also be a Liberal, and doubtless can’t stand me!”
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A rep for Swift didn’t instantly reply to Selection‘s request for remark. Nevertheless, Dina LaPolt, a key lawyer behind the MMA, disputed Trump’s claims in a press release to Selection on Sunday.
“This [claim] is humorous to me,” she wrote. “Trump did nothing on our laws besides signal it, and doesn’t even know what the Music Modernization Act does. Somebody ought to ask him what the invoice really achieved.”
Whereas the total wording of the act, which was created to replace the rights of songwriters and creators within the digital age, is offered from the U.S. Copyright Workplace, a succinct abstract may be present in a 2020 put up on the Library of Congress website.
“Principally, the MMA adjustments the best way songwriters and music publishers are paid statutory mechanical royalties [permission to reproduce and distribute recordings] when their work is streamed on interactive streaming companies like Apple Music or Spotify, or bought on downloading companies like Amazon Music,” the abstract reads. “Starting in 2021, a nonprofit entity designated by the Copyright Workplace, known as the Mechanical Licensing Collective, or MLC, will gather and distribute these royalty funds to copyright homeowners of musical works matched to sound recordings in its database. And down the road, however no sooner than 2023, any unclaimed royalties can begin being paid to copyright homeowners and songwriters of matched works in line with every work’s market share. However to receives a commission, you will want to register your songs with the MLC.”
A bullet-point breakdown of the updates and enhancements that the act instituted may be discovered here.
(The truth is, the normally apolitical Swift has spoken out in opposition to Trump previously, writing in Elle in 2019, “Invoking racism and frightening concern by means of thinly veiled messaging isn’t what I would like from our leaders, and I noticed that it really is my duty to make use of my affect in opposition to that disgusting rhetoric.”)
Trump did certainly signal the act in 2018 — which had been handed unanimously by Congress after years of labor by its proponents — politicizing the signing by doing so in a photograph alternative together with such boosters as Child Rock, the Seaside Boys’ Mike Love, John Wealthy, the Doobie Brothers’ Jeff Baxter and others; Kanye West had been anticipated to attend however didn’t.
Regardless, the passage of the act was greeted with great enthusiasm by all corners of the music industry, because it up to date a woefully out of date copyright legislation that had been handed in 1998, lengthy earlier than the proliferation of streaming.
“The Music Modernization Act is now the legislation of the land, and hundreds of songwriters and artists are higher for it. The result’s a music market higher based on honest competitors and honest pay,” mentioned Mitch Glazier, the president of the Recording Trade Affiliation of America, amongst many different outstanding commentators after the act was handed. “The enactment of this legislation demonstrates what music creators and digital companies can do once we work collectively collaboratively to advance a mutually helpful agenda. It’s an ideal day for music.”
Republican Congressman Darryl Issa, Chairman of the Home Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Mental Property, and the Web, wrote an op-ed for Variety in 2023 enthusiastically praising the act on its fifth anniversary, writing partly: “Congress achieved that rarest of issues: A consensus resolution that acknowledged the rights of musical artists and created a approach they might be compensated pretty by publishers.”
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