David Israelite
What the Metaverse Means for Music Creators (Guest Column)
There is a lot of buzz around the concept of a “Metaverse.” The company formerly known as Facebook recently announced its ambition to create a futuristic, immersive social experience, and to achieve this, it will become a new hub for listening to, discovering and interacting with music and music creators. Undoubtedly, music will be as important to the metaverse as it is to the real world. As Mark Zuckerberg recently told The Vergecast, “You might be able to jump into an experience, like a 3D concert or something, from your phone, so you can get elements that are 2D or elements that are 3D. … I think that this is going to be a really big part of the next chapter for the technology industry, and it’s something that we’re very excited about.” Merging social media, gaming, consumerism and othe...
Roblox and Twitch Are Gaming the System Against Songwriters (Guest Op-Ed)
The company has made hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of creators, including by requiring users to pay every time they upload music — taking advantage of largely young people’s lack of understanding about copyright — and then they take virtually no action to prevent repeat infringement or alert users to the risks they are taking. The fact that mostly children, who would have no idea whether Roblox has covered its legal bases, are the ones who are being taken advantage of is particularly egregious When confronted with the need to license in order to protect itself and its users, Roblox thus far has been defiant. Not only have they refused to pay for the songs they know are on the platform, they are trying to hide behind a misinterpretation of the DMCA to avoid liabil...
NMPA President: Unmatched Royalties Finally Turned Over to MLC Brings Insight and Progress (Guest Op-Ed)
How we got here is complicated. Separate from the effort to improve how much songwriters are paid from streaming is the challenge of even receiving the money at all. It’s been well known that streaming services were stockpiling unpaid royalties, and over the years that money continued to accrue with little recourse other than costly lawsuits that didn’t solve the underlying problem and threatened the growth we needed in a post Napster world. For over a decade experts have estimated, debated and debunked theories about how much was being held. Spotify, Apple, Amazon and others have long said they employed exhaustive searches for copyright owners. There have been congressional oversight hearings, studies done by the U.S. Copyright Office and industry experts, however the magni...
