Making a Scene Presents – The American Music Fairness Act Could Finally Make Radio Pay — But Indie Artists May End Up Paying a Different Price

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Terrestrial radio is no longer the artist-breaking machine it once was. That is exactly why this bill matters, and exactly why indie artists should be watching it closely.

The Tower That Once Ruled the Music Business Is Not What It Used to Be

For decades, radio was the closest thing the music business had to a national ignition switch. One spin in the right market could move records, change tour offers, wake up labels, and turn a local act into a real conversation. That old story still has power because it used to be true. But in 2026, terrestrial radio is no longer the center of gravity for discovery the way it once was. Edison Research reported that in Q4 2025, radio still held 61% of all ad-supported audio listening time in the U.S., which means it remains a huge medium. But that same broad strength now lives beside a very different discovery landscape, one shaped by streaming, social media, YouTube, and recommendation engines instead of one dominant gatekeeper.

The dashboard tells the story too. In March 2025, Edison reported that among Americans 18 and older who had driven or ridden in a car in the past month, 40% had Apple CarPlay or Android Auto and 33% actively used one of those systems. That does not mean radio disappeared. It means radio lost its old monopoly on the place where it once had unmatched control: the car. When the dashboard opens up, discovery opens up with it.

And commercial radio did not respond to that pressure by becoming bolder. It became more careful. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says radio consultants commonly use focus groups, callout research, and music testing to guide programming. Coleman Insights describes callout research as a routine process used to measure how familiar listeners are with songs and how much they like or dislike them. That is a long way from the old romantic idea of radio as a fearless scout for the unknown. Today, much of commercial radio behaves less like a talent scout and more like a carefully managed risk system.

That matters because the old legal defense of terrestrial radio has always been built on one central claim: radio gives artists promotion, so radio should not also have to pay performers and sound recording owners for using their recordings. But the U.S. Copyright Office undercut that logic years ago when it wrote that as consumers move away from music ownership, the potential for sales becomes less relevant and “the promotional value of radio” becomes “less apparent.” The Office said the terrestrial sound recording performance-right issue was “ripe for resolution” and specifically noted that promotional value could still be considered by a rate-setting authority. In other words, even the Copyright Office was signaling that the old exposure argument was no longer enough by itself.

The Bill That Says Radio Finally Has to Pay

That is the political opening the American Music Fairness Act is trying to fill. In the current Congress, the active Senate bill is S. 326, introduced on January 30, 2025, and the House companion is H.R. 861, introduced on January 31, 2025. The core move in the bill is blunt and historic. It would amend copyright law so that, in the case of sound recordings, the copyright owner would have the exclusive right to perform the work publicly “by means of an audio transmission,” not just a digital audio transmission. That is the legal change that would pull terrestrial AM/FM into a sound-recording performance-right framework.

Right now, U.S. terrestrial radio pays for the public performance of the underlying musical work, so songwriters and publishers are compensated through performing rights organizations. But traditional over-the-air radio does not pay a sound recording performance royalty to the featured artist and the owner of the master. SoundExchange states that directly in its FAQ: there is currently no performance right for over-the-air broadcasts, and artists and record labels are not compensated when traditional radio uses their work. That is the loophole AMFA is designed to close.

The bill also says the Copyright Royalty Judges must begin a proceeding as soon as practicable after enactment to determine royalty rates and terms for nonsubscription broadcast transmissions. That means AMFA is not just symbolic language. It is built to force the rate-setting machinery to engage. And the bill preserves an important nuance: it tells the CRJs to consider economic, competitive, and programming information, including whether use of radio may substitute for sales or promote other revenue streams for the sound recording owner. So AMFA does not erase radio’s promotional value. It just refuses to let that value remain a blanket excuse for zero sound-recording payment forever.

The Fine Print They Point To When They Say Small Stations Are Protected

Here is where the story gets more complicated, and more honest. The American Music Fairness Act does not treat giant corporate radio groups and tiny nonprofit stations the same way. Section 4 creates special protection for smaller broadcasters. A qualifying terrestrial station with less than $100,000 in prior-year revenue would pay $10 a year. A qualifying public broadcasting entity with revenue between $100,000 and $1.5 million would pay $100 a year. A qualifying non-public station in that same band would pay $500 a year. To qualify, the individual station has to be under $1.5 million in revenue, the aggregate revenue of the owner and commonly controlled entities has to stay under $10 million, and the station owner has to submit a signed certification of eligibility to the designated nonprofit collective by January 31 each year.

Supporters of the bill lean hard on that structure. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s office said when the 2025 bill was introduced that the legislation contains protections for small, college, and noncommercial stations. The Recording Academy’s advocacy page likewise says the bill includes protections intended to let local and community-supported radio continue to thrive. So nobody writing honestly about this bill can pretend Congress ignored the small-station issue. It did not. It addressed it directly.

That is also why this debate is more interesting than the usual “good guys versus bad guys” storyline. Even some community-radio advocates have supported earlier versions of AMFA because the flat fees looked low and predictable. NFCB said in 2021 that the noncommercial fee structure in the earlier bill was affordable and rejected the idea that artists had to choose between fair pay and community radio. That history matters because it keeps the analysis grounded. The indie concern here is not that the bill obviously crushes every small station on day one. The text does not support that claim.

Most Indie Artists Are Not Being Robbed by Massive Airplay — They Are Being Ignored by It

This is the point a lot of artist-side lobbying tends to glide past. AMFA may be fair in principle, but for most indie artists it is not a magic-income bill. It creates a right, not a radio career. If your music is not already getting meaningful terrestrial airplay, then creating a terrestrial sound-recording royalty does not suddenly produce meaningful money. Usage-based rights only become checks when actual usage exists. That is not cynicism. That is how the system works.

The biggest direct winners from AMFA would likely be artists and rights owners who already have substantial broadcast exposure, especially those who own or control their masters. Under the existing statutory framework, receipts distributed by the nonprofit collective are split so that 50% goes to the sound recording copyright owner, 45% goes on a per-recording basis to the featured artist or artists, and the remaining 5% is split between funds for nonfeatured musicians and nonfeatured vocalists. For self-releasing artists who actually own their masters, that structure matters a lot. But most working indie artists do not sit on the kind of AM/FM footprint that makes this a life-changing line item.

That is why the indie conversation has to move away from the giant abstract word “artists” and get specific. The average indie act is not worried about losing money from a hundred daily commercial spins. The average indie act is worried about getting any meaningful radio support at all. And when they do get that support, it is usually not coming from the consultant-polished center of corporate radio. It is coming from the edges.

The Stations That Still Take Chances Are the Ones Least Built for More Pressure

Those edges still matter. The North American College & Community Radio Chart says it tabulates weekly airplay from college and non-commercial radio stations in the United States and Canada. Its genre charts include formats like blues, folk, jazz, heavy, Latin, and a “Non-Comm” chart specifically focused on community stations. That is the ecosystem where a lot of independent music still finds human ears before it ever finds scale.

The College Radio Foundation describes its mission as supporting the activities and continuing operations of college radio stations in North America and says it works to promote and support non-commercial college radio stations and the students involved with them. That is not the language of a rich sector. It is the language of a fragile one. These stations are important precisely because they are small, weird, local, and still willing to say yes to music that would never survive a focus-group meeting.

Community radio lives in a similarly lean reality. NFCB says its member stations are independent, nonprofit, and noncommercial; programming is shaped by volunteers, averaging 125 community volunteers per station; and more than six in ten operate on less than $100,000 a year. That is one reason these stations matter so much to indie artists. They are not giant commercial products. They are cultural infrastructure.

BMI’s own royalty information quietly shows the economic scale of this world. BMI says a feature performance of a song on college radio is paid at a minimum rate of six cents total for all participants on the songwriter side. That is not an AMFA sound-recording rate, and it should not be confused with one. But it does reveal something useful. Niche, noncommercial radio spins can matter deeply for scene-building, credibility, and discovery even when the money attached to any one play is tiny. For indie artists, college and community radio are often not cash machines. They are bridges.

Will the Spins Still Count If the Station Is Tiny?

This is the practical question indie artists should ask, and the careful answer is yes, they should count — but the exact terrestrial reporting rules do not exist yet because AMFA has not become law and the CRJs have not yet run the terrestrial rate proceeding the bill would require. So anyone claiming to know the final exact reporting method for every tiny station is getting ahead of the law.

What we do know is that the current Section 114 system already depends on notice and recordkeeping. The statute says the Copyright Royalty Judges establish requirements so copyright owners receive reasonable notice of the use of their sound recordings and so records of such use are kept and made available by entities performing sound recordings. It also says anyone who wants to use the statutory license has to comply with those notice requirements and pay the royalty fees. That is the backbone of how use turns into payable data now, and it would almost certainly be the backbone of any terrestrial system later.

The current reporting rules under 37 CFR Part 370 show what that backbone looks like in practice for existing statutory-license users. The Copyright Royalty Board’s reporting rules require reports of use, and SoundExchange says all statutory licensees generally submit reports identifying what sound recordings were performed and the audience measurement for those performances. For commercial broadcasters in the current digital simulcast system, SoundExchange says non-minimum-fee broadcasters submit monthly reports with a complete census of all sound recordings that accrued performance liability. Minimum-fee broadcasters submit quarterly reports using sample periods, and each track listing includes the name of the track, the artist, the ISRC if available, and audience-related data.

That is the key point for indie artists. Small stations are not supposed to vanish into a black hole just because they pay a smaller fee. In the existing statutory world, the fee level and the reporting burden are related but not identical. Smaller broadcasters have been allowed simplified paths, such as sample-based reporting rather than a full census in some cases, but they are still part of the system that converts use into distributed royalties. If AMFA becomes law, the likeliest outcome is not that college and community spins disappear from the count. The likeliest outcome is that the CRJs would have to build a terrestrial reporting structure that still captures those uses while giving smaller stations some version of lighter compliance. That last point is an inference from the existing statutory framework, not a final rule, but it is the most grounded inference available.

There is also a clue in the current public-radio digital framework. In March 2026, the Copyright Royalty Judges published a final rule for certain public radio stations covering 2026 through 2030. That rule says SoundExchange remains the collective and that applicable regulations, including Part 370, still apply where not inconsistent. Again, that is about digital public-radio uses, not AMFA’s still-unenacted terrestrial rights. But it shows that even public and noncommercial broadcasters already live inside a reporting-and-collective world when sound recording royalties are involved.

Getting Counted Is Not Automatic — Artists Still Have to Do the Business Work

Even a perfect reporting system does not help an artist whose metadata is a mess. SoundExchange says creators and copyright holders should register to receive royalty payments that may be due to them. It also says registered creators can search and claim their recordings, track their catalog, and review their royalty payments. That matters because if a station reports the use and the collective cannot match the recording cleanly to the right artist or rights owner, the problem is not that the spin “didn’t count.” The problem is that the system could not identify it properly.

ISRCs matter here too. SoundExchange says reports of use should include the ISRC where available, and it says its repertoire database is populated with ISRCs and metadata submitted by sound recording copyright owners, distributors, and ISRC managers. It also notes that rights owners can submit recordings directly into its repertoire database. So if AMFA ever becomes law, artists who want their small-station and big-station spins to actually find them will need to do the boring grown-up work: register, claim recordings, maintain metadata, and make sure their ISRCs and ownership data are right.

The Real Danger Is Not the Fee Alone — It Is the Weight of One More System

That is where the real indie warning lives. The low annual fees in AMFA are not, by themselves, apocalyptic. A $10 or $100 or $500 line item is not what scares me most in this bill. What scares me is what often happens to fragile cultural institutions when you add one more legal framework, one more certification deadline, one more reporting rule, and one more compliance burden to an operation already running on volunteers and thin margins. The bill itself makes clear that there will be regulations, certifications, collective administration, and a broader licensing regime around this right.

That is why broadcasters and artist groups can both be partly right and still miss the indie point. SoundExchange is right that the AM/FM loophole is real and outdated. NAB is right that local radio still serves communities and that new costs matter to local broadcasters. But the part that matters most to indie artists sits in the overlap: the stations most likely to play unproven or niche music are usually the stations least built to absorb more friction, even when the direct fee looks manageable on paper. NAB opposes AMFA as a new fee on local radio, while NFCB’s own data shows just how lean community stations already are. Put those facts together and the likelier indie risk is not sudden extinction. It is erosion. A little less risk-taking. A little more caution. A little more pressure to narrow programming.

That last sentence is a projection, not a claim about what the statute literally commands. But it is a projection rooted in the verified reality of how fragile these stations are and how rights systems already work. Small cultural institutions usually do not die in one dramatic blow. They get worn down by cumulative pressure. And for indie artists, the tragedy would be obvious: Congress might finally correct a real royalty injustice while weakening one of the last radio spaces that still treats independent music like culture before content.

Rights Matter. So Do the Last Doors Still Open to the Uninvited.

The American Music Fairness Act has a real moral case behind it. Terrestrial radio’s free pass on sound recording performance royalties is increasingly hard to defend in a world where radio is no longer the all-powerful discovery engine it once was. The Copyright Office saw that. The bill text reflects that. SoundExchange’s advocacy reflects that. On principle, artists and master owners should be paid when their recordings are used.

But for independent artists, principle is only half the story. Most of them are not being denied a fortune by constant terrestrial airplay. They are trying to survive in a system where the commercial center of radio rarely plays them, while the smaller stations that do take chances are often volunteer-powered and financially delicate. So the real test of AMFA is not just whether it makes radio pay. The real test is whether it can create that right without making college and community radio weaker, narrower, or more timid.

If Congress gets that balance right, AMFA could be overdue reform. If it gets it wrong, indie artists may win a principle and lose a lifeline. And in today’s music economy, the last human doorway on the dial is worth protecting like part of the business itself.

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