Washington, DC, November 9, 2023 – Following the the release of iHeartMedia’s Q3 2023 financial results, Senator Mark Pryor, Chairman of the musicFIRST Coalition, issued the following statement:
“Once again, iHeart’s hypocrisy was on full display during today’s earnings call. As the radio giant celebrated its financial performance to investors on Wall Street, they failed to mention the fact that, at this very moment, their lobbyists are aggressively attempting to convince lawmakers into believing that they can’t afford to pay the artists for the music that fills their airwaves. Let’s set the record straight: iHeart makes billions of dollars through advertising by playing 50 million songs a year — and not giving a dime to the music performer.
iHeart’s hypocrisy is astounding, and is made even more insulting by the fact that they’re being made during Music Fairness Awareness Month — an annual effort by the music community throughout the month of November to bring attention to this decades-long injustice of denying compensation to artists for the use of their sound recordings on AM/FM radio in the United States.
It’s time for our nation’s $5 billion-plus a year Big Radio conglomerates to do what every music platform and almost every democratic nation already does: Pay the artists behind the music that underpins their entire business model. We encourage lawmakers to recognize the greed driving iHeart’s smokescreen opposition to this widely accepted practice. By joining music artists, labor unions, and community broadcasters in support of the bipartisan, common sense American Music Fairness Act, we can end this unfairness once and for all.”
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About musicFIRST
musicFIRST works to ensure music creators get fair pay for their work on all platforms and wherever and however it is played. We rally the people and organizations who make and love music to end the broken status quo that allows AM/FM to use any song ever recorded without paying its performers a dime. And to stand up for fair pay on digital radio — and whatever comes next.
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