This post is authored by Fox Rothschild associate Paul Fling:

Met with widespread support, the Music Modernization Act was signed into law on October 11, 2018. The Music Modernization Act (“MMA”) largely came about as a reaction to music streaming services’ domination of the music consumer market. In fact, streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora have more than doubled in revenue since 2015. As a result, a new system for distributing royalties was sorely needed.

So what does the MMA do? Generally, the MMA will set up a new, and (hopefully) more efficient way of paying mechanical royalties to songwriters when a musical composition is reproduced. Prior to the MMA, no central database or organization existed to facilitate music services filing for and obtaining a mechanical license to use a particular song. Because the growth of streaming services has led to a drastic increase in entities seeking mechanical licenses, the pre-MMA system no longer met the needs of songwriters/owners and streaming services alike. Essentially, services claim it is too difficult to find and pay the correct author for every song, while song owners claim services use such an excuse to avoid paying royalties.

To address these issues the MMA will set up a centralized entity to collect royalties and distribute them to the proper songwriter or owner. This group, for the time being, is called the Mechanical Licensing Collective. To participate in this system, digital services will pay the MLC and receive a blanket license allowing them to use any song without threat of infringement. In turn, the MLC will then seek to find the proper owner of songs that are played and pay those owners in accordance with the volume services have used the owner’s song.

Ultimately, musicians and music consumer services are hoping the MMA succeeds in creating an efficient and fair way of providing mechanical licenses and distributing royalties to the proper owners.

You can read the act in its entirety here.