SoundExchange CEO Calls U.S. Radio Royalty Gap ‘An Extremely Unusual Exception in the World’

Following his Senate testimony, Michael Huppe talks with Billboard’s On the Record podcast about radio’s evolution — and why U.S. artists remain unpaid. Michael Huppe Elliott O’Donovan Trending on Billboard SoundExchange’s CEO, Michael Huppe, has been working towards getting artists paid on terrestrial AM/FM radio stations for the last decade, but he says the effort to get this royalty in the U.S. dates back “much longer,” he explains. “There’s a letter that was issued by Frank Sinatra — I don’t remember exactly when, but I think it was about 30 years ago — to Bruce Springsteen [saying the same thing].” Related SoundExchange has collected royalties for artists on digital and satellite radio sources like SiriusXM and Pandora since its formation in the 1990s. However, for terrestrial radio, artists are not required to receive the same compensation — or any at all. Only songwriters do. While many of today’s biggest stars are both artists and songwriters, Huppe still believes this is an unfair practice that demeans the contribution of artists and the record labels footing the bill to take songs to radio in the first place: “We’re the only industrialized country where this is true.” Huppe points to the song “Respect”
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