Ahead of House and Senate hearings this week on reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), the musicFIRST Coalition issued the following statement:

“The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) will be on Capitol Hill this week in full force. They’ll argue that reauthorizing STELA represents an unfair and unnecessary subsidy benefiting billion-dollar satellite TV companies by allowing them to underpay the TV content creators who make what is the lifeblood of their business. The NAB will argue that those creators should be paid fairly for their work.

“If that argument sounds incredibly familiar, it should. It’s the exact same argument music creators make when we contend that terrestrial radio should pay artists when sound recordings are played on their stations—just like every other music platform does.

“The NAB is the primary opponent of an FM performance right for sound recordings. Members of Congress should call the NAB out for broadcasting out of both sides of their mouth and support the principle of fair pay for broadcast radio.”

AFM is a founding member of musicFIRST which is a national coalition of the music community representing artists, unions, and record labels that supports paying music creators when their work is played on any platform.