Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, building on Senator Hatch's comments, we are grateful for his service to the U.S. Senate for more than four decades and grateful he is a songwriter. Of course, he comes from a culture and a faith that emphasizes music.

As a little boy in the East Tennessee mountains, I remember every week listening on the Zenith radio to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I think everybody in Utah and in the Mormon faith actually grows up learning to sing and to enjoy music.

Orrin Hatch is not just a U.S. Senator, he is a genuine songwriter. He has a gold and a platinum record. I know many national songwriters who have cowritten with him, and they admire him greatly.

I can think of no more important tribute to him than the Hatch- Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, which should pass the House this week and be on its way to the President. Then it will be, as Senator Hatch said, the single-most important piece of legislation in decades or in a generation that changes copyright law in a way that is fair to songwriters.

Senator Hatch is correct. This has not been easy. It has taken several years. There are a great many different people to it. The heavy lifts and the unexpected developments were occurring all the way down to about 30 minutes before it passed last Tuesday night.

It has been a great privilege to work with Senator Hatch and his staff on this legislation whom I will have more to say about in a minute.

The Senator from Utah has done a very good job of explaining what the bill does, but the truth is, copyright law is complicated. About the first 25 times somebody explains to you the law governing songwriting, you will not have a clue what they are talking about. So let me tell a couple of stories about songwriting that might help make it clear.

Right after World War II, two national songwriters, Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart, were driving from Memphis to Nashville, back before the interstates were created, and one said to the other: Well, Missouri has a waltz and Kentucky has a waltz, why doesn't Tennessee have a waltz? So on that drive--probably about a 5-hour drive then--they took a matchbox, an old penny matchbox that held wooden matches, threw the matches on the floorboard, and on the back of it they wrote the words to the ``Tennessee Waltz.''

Now, the ``Tennessee Waltz'' was already a waltz. It was called the ``No Name Waltz.'' People played it and sang it in different places. It was just a random song, but they added these few words to it. Then, that night when he got back, Pee Wee King wrote it on a lead sheet. That is what you call a blank page of music. He took it in to Fred Rose the next day, who was his publisher. Fred Rose was the publisher for Hank Williams, Roy Acuff--all kinds of people. He made one change in the words. Where it said: ``Oh, the Tennessee waltz, the Tennessee waltz,'' he changed the words to ``I remember the night and the Tennessee waltz.''

That song went nowhere for a while. It was performed around by Pee Wee King until Mercury Records decided they had a song, a different song, called ``Boogie Woogie Santa Claus.'' They wanted the hottest young female singer in America to sing it so they flew Patti Page to New York in about 1950. She sang ``Boogie Woogie Santa Clause'' on Mercury Records, but they had nothing to put on the back of the record. So somebody suggested they just throw on the back of the record this ``Tennessee Waltz.''

Well, the ``Tennessee Waltz'' sold 5 million copies. It became the most recorded song ever by a female artist. In many ways, it is the Magna Carta of country music.

So the question is, How did that happen? What is the mystery that causes a waltz that is just kicked around for a long time, has a few words placed on it by a few songwriters driving from Memphis to Nashville, to suddenly sell 5 million copies? Well, none of us really knows. It is just a magnificent form of art.

All over my State of Tennessee, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of teachers, taxi drivers, waitresses, people thinking of songs, getting together and writing songs, hoping to have the next No. 1 hit.

I saw Bob DiPiero at the Bluebird Cafe a week ago Saturday.

I say to Senator Hatch, he was a guitar teacher in RiverGate Mall, outside of Nashville, in the early 1980s. At about 3, he would take a bus from downtown Nashville out to RiverGate Mall, and he would teach guitar lessons to all of these kids after school until 9. Then, during the day, he would write songs. He didn't do well at all until one day he wrote a song with the lyrics: ``My baby is American made, born and bred in the U.S.A.'' Well, everybody knows that song now, and Bob DiPiero is a great songwriter. So I guess he makes a living off of songwriting, but lots of people don't.

This bill is about songs that are played over the internet. The way Bob DiPiero or Redd Stewart or Pee Wee King's descendants would get paid for their creative work is whenever the song is played over the internet, this Hatch-Goodlatte legislation says: We have a way to make sure you get paid if you are the songwriter or you own the rights, and, No. 2, we have changed the law to make it more likely that you will get a fair market value for what you get paid--those two things.

I have asked several of the songwriters and the people in the music industry: Do you really think this will make a difference? They, to a person, say yes.

Will it make it as good as it was? No, it probably will not, but it will be fair, and it will create an environment where not just Bob DiPiero can get paid for ``My baby is American made'' but where a lot more songwriters can make a decent living because they get paid and get paid a fair market value for their work.

I will tell you another story I have repeated on the floor about that. Unfortunately, I don't have a gold record, and I don't have a platinum record, but I can play the piano. I am as grateful for music as Senator Hatch is. When I was 4, my mother took me to the Maryville College, and I began piano lessons, which I continued until I was 16.

Senator McConnell, the majority leader, who had a wonderful and sainted mother who helped him recover from polio, once told me the one thing he regrets about his mother is she allowed him to stop taking piano lessons.

I said back to Senator McConnell: I don't ever remember ever having a choice. I made a deal with my mother that I would practice 30 minutes in the morning, and I would get to do what I wanted to in the afternoon, and I had a wonderful time with music.

I say to the Senator from Utah, when I was Governor, I was trying to think what could unite our State. The Presiding Officer probably had thoughts like that when he was Governor of his State. All I could think of that would unite our big, long State, from Memphis to Bristol, was music, from Beale Street in Memphis through Music City in Nashville, to the home of country music in Bristol, TN, where they brought a recording machine in 1927 and called for the hillbillies to come down out of the mountains. Among the hillbillies who came and had their music recorded were Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family. That was the beginning of what we call country music, what you hear on the radio in Nashville.

So as I was thinking about what united Tennessee, I thought, well, music. I asked the legislature in our State in the 1980s--and they did it--to appropriate some moneys for endowments for all of our community orchestras. There are about two dozen of them. If we give the Nashville Symphony or the Greenville Community Orchestra some State dollars, if they matched it, then they would have a little endowment that would support that music. I went around the State and played the piano with all of those community orchestras and had a good time when people came out to see the Governor make a mistake or miss a chord or that kind of thing.

So music is terribly important to our State, as it is to Utah and as it is to our country.

Ken Burns has a new film coming out. I think Ken Burns is America's greatest storyteller today. I mean, we have other good ones, but today he is. He has done more than 30 films. There is one about the Mayo Clinic that is out today. There is the Civil War, National Parks, all of those films--Vietnam more recently. His new film is the film he thinks may be the most popular film of all he has produced, of the 30, and it is about country music. It is about the stories and the lives of the people whom country music is about.

I think of Jessi Alexander, whom I just heard play a song at the Bluebird Cafe. She had heard on the radio about the father from Texas whose son was killed in Afghanistan, and they asked him how he grieved, and he said: I drive his truck. She wrote a song, ``I Drive Your Truck,'' about that father and his son who had been killed defending our country. It won the song of the year, as it should have.

So these emotional stories about life and death and whiskey and love and romance and cheating and everything that goes into human nature, these are the stories that make it into these songs.

Sometimes--sometimes--they are like the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' You put some words with a waltz that has been around for a while, and out comes 5 million records sold.

Sometimes it is more like this story. I was coming out of the drugstore in Maryville, TN, and I ran into an old couple in a pickup truck. I walked by them, and I said: How are you all doing?

The older lady said: Well, we are just falling apart together.

So I told that story to Lee Brice and some songwriters who were at our home for the weekend writing songs.

They said: We could do something with that, and they wrote a song, ``Falling Apart Together.'' Lee Brice is a pretty well-known singer. He and Billy Montana and John Stone wrote it. According to Nashville tradition, they gave me a fourth of the royalties because that is what they do. If you make any contribution to the song, you get a little piece of the action.

I thought: Well, this is good. I can actually do that as a U.S. Senator. That is legal. The Ethics Committee will approve that. So in 2016, the royalty I received for ``Falling Apart Together,'' which was recorded by Lee Brice and is on one of his albums, was $101.75. You can't make a living on that.

What Senator Hatch and the Senate has done, and the House is about to do and it will go on to the President, is to change the law.

First, it will create an entity. Those two songwriters who wrote the ``Tennessee Waltz'' after World War II, let's say their great- grandchildren now own all of the rights, and they are spread all over the place. Let's say Spotify wants to play the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' Now all they have to do is to go down to this new entity to get a license. They have a right to do it, and nobody can sue them. It is the entity's job to go find all of these 100 descendants and pay them the royalty.

Then we changed the law to try to make sure the royalties are a fair market value. Now, in that case, if some company owns that, it might be easier to find them, but that is why everybody came together to pass this bill.

Specifically, the legislation will help make sure songwriters are paid when their songs are played by creating a new simplified licensing entity.

This new licensing entity will make it easier for digital music companies to obtain a license to play songs and ensure songwriters are paid when their music is played.

This new entity helps songwriters because it will collect royalties each time a song is played, look for the songwriter, and hold on to their royalties for 3 years until they can be found.

This new entity also helps digital music companies because it makes sure songwriters get paid, which means fewer lawsuits.

Second, the legislation will help make sure songwriters are paid a fair market value for their work by doing three things.

The legislation revises outdated songwriter royalty standards to ensure songwriters are paid a fair market rate for their work. The new royalty payments will be based on what a willing buyer and willing seller would agree to in a free market--not the statutory below-market standard of today.

The legislation allows ASCAP and BMI--the two largest performing rights organizations--to present new evidence about the fair market value of a songwriter's works--like what the performer earns for their songs--to a Federal rate court judge when there is a dispute about royalty rates for songwriters.

The legislation allows ASCAP and BMI to have Federal judges in the Southern District of New York randomly assigned to hear their rate cases, rather than have all the proceedings occur before the same judge each time. This should lead to better outcomes for songwriters.

This change in the law made sense in the internet world. Today, in the world we live in, more than half of the revenues in the music business are for songs played over the internet. The internet has changed music just like it has changed everything else. This changes the law to put us into the internet age. It changes some laws that have been around for centuries, since the days of the player piano.

Since there are others who will be wanting to speak, I have had other chances to talk about the bill. I have said most of what I wanted to say, except for a couple of thank-yous.

First, Orrin Hatch is exactly the right leader for this bill in the Senate for a variety of reasons. He is chairman of one important committee and nearly ranking on another. Through his prestige and his position in the Senate and through the respect we have for him, he was able to ask Senators to step back and allow us to do this very complex piece of legislation in a situation where any one Senator could have blocked it--and many did for a while, until they were persuaded not to.

I want to thank Chairman Grassley and Senator Feinstein for moving it through the Judiciary Committee expeditiously. This could not have happened if Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer had not created an environment in which we could do this. Senator Hatch mentioned Senator Whitehouse and Senator Coons, who were among the lead Democratic cosponsors. We had 82 cosponsors of this bill. We only have 100 Senators, and we had 82 cosponsors of the bill.

I want to particularly thank Senator Durbin, who may be a Democrat from Illinois, but he loves to go to Nashville and go to the Grand Ole Opry, and he jumped on early. He is the No. 2 Democrat, and he has been a big help.

Doug Collins, Hakeem Jeffries, and Darrell Issa in the House of Representatives were real leaders from the beginning, and, of course, Bob Goodlatte and Ranking Member Nadler were as well.

I think it is important to join Senator Hatch in mentioning again those music groups whom we sat down with more than 2 years ago and said: Look, we have been here for a long time, and we could continue to argue about what you disagree on or we could try to pass what you can agree on. And for the last 2\1/2\ years, they have worked to compromise, to agree on what they could agree on, and they have done that in an important way.

I thank the Nashville Song Writers Association International--Bart Herbison especially, but a whole bunch of them, including the National Music Publishers Association, ASCAP, BMI, the Recording Academy, Sound Exchange, Digital Media Association, Song Writers of North America, Internet Association, Recording Industry Association of America, and the National Association of Broadcasters, which came with a strongly support recommendation in the end, which was a big, big help.

Senator Hatch was correct. The most valuable players in all of this most likely have been the staff members on both sides of the aisle and in both Houses who helped put the competing interests together--and there were many--in a way that produced this bill.

I would especially like to thank Lindsey Garcia, who is sitting here with me, and Paul McKernan, who worked on this for a long time, and David Cleary and Allison Martin on my staff.

Chris Bates, Matt Jensen, and Matt Sandgren on Senator Hatch's staff have been terrific and essential.

I thank Rita Lari from the Senate Judiciary staff. We were joking the other day. When we first talked to her about this, she said: Are you sure you can pass a bill like this? Most people didn't think it was possible to get all of the competing interests here to agree.

Congressman Doug Collins and his staff have really been at the forefront of this, including Sally Rose Larson.

Republican floor staff Megan Mercer was a big help.

A special shout-out to Reema Dodin, who works for Senator Durbin and who was a consistent help but was especially helpful on last Tuesday afternoon when we only had a little bit of time and we needed to get some last-minute changes cleared in the Democratic cloakroom as well as the Republican cloakroom.

This would be a good exercise for a chapter in a book on legislation sometime. But it is going to be the Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, and the result is going to be that thousands and thousands of songwriters in this country for the first time in a long time are, A, going to get paid for their work, and, B, they are going to get paid more of a fair market value, as they should.

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have worked on it, and I thank all of my colleagues for working so well with Senator Hatch and me to get it done.

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