Obsolete AM radio has the congressional support musical artists deserve

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct a surname. We regret the error.

Whether AM radio is a dying format will be decided by the market, not Congress. 

Nevertheless, Congress seems ready to pass the AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act, requiring U.S. auto manufacturers to continue delivering new vehicles with sound systems that can receive AM broadcasts. 

The bill, originally introduced by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) last May, rejects the consideration by several major automakers to stop including AM receivers in new vehicles. 

Although the National Association of Broadcasters reports that 82 million Americans per month listen to AM, new electric vehicle drivetrains interfere with AM frequencies. Last year, Ford stated that phasing out AM was just about “changing with the times.” 

In May 2023, Markey introduced the bill with 33 co-sponsors. By last month, 59 senators from both sides of the aisle and 246 House co-sponsors had signed on in support.  

Ford has reversed its position for now, and notwithstanding the business considerations for automakers, bipartisan support for the AM Radio bill is no surprise. Republicans can announce they’re protecting conservative and religious talk radio, and Democrats can say they’re protecting radio for marginalized communities and maintaining an essential part of the Emergency Broadcast System. 

Everyone will accept, or even applaud, the government telling automakers how to respond to the market, and of course, Big Radio will be happy. But one constituency Congress may not want to look in the eye when they pass the AM Radio bill will be the musical artists.  

The U.S. is an outlier among major radio markets in that broadcasters pay royalties to songwriters but not to recording artists for public performance through terrestrial broadcast. The fight to remedy this discrepancy is almost as old as radio itself, but in June 2021, it finally looked like basic fairness might win. 

Former Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) stood on Capitol Hill among several performing artists, including Dionne Warwick and Sam Moore, to announce the American Music Fairness Act. 

Even policy experts I know, who have seen this issue come and go over the years, noted that this time, the National Association of Broadcasters may no longer wield a large enough political hammer to keep killing the legislation. 

As Issa told reporters that day, the longstanding rule of “not one penny” to the recording artists is a bad faith arrangement that needs to be made right. 

Three years later, it looks like Big Radio will get the fast-track legislation it wants — a law that may preserve obsolete technology — while American musical artists are left to wonder again whether they will ever participate in the radio market. 

And it’s not just the U.S. market. Because American broadcasters don’t pay royalties to foreign artists, foreign broadcasters don’t pay royalties to American artists. Moreover, the relationship between the AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act and the American Music Fairness Act may be more than just bad optics for Congress.  

Without the passage of the American Music Fairness Act, the AM Radio law could serve as a framework for a technological workaround that would sustain at least some of the royalty-free rides for billion-dollar broadcasters. 

And once the broadcasters get AM in every vehicle, might this serve as a precedent for FM in every vehicle next? If that’s the case, and the lion’s share of broadcasting to automobiles remains terrestrial rather than digital for years to come, the stations could continue to play music while paying artists “not one penny.”

Looking down the road (pun intended), Congress could remedy this potential loophole by mandating digital-only broadcast to vehicles or simply passing the American Music Fairness Act along with the AM Radio bill. 

After all, regardless of any other rationale to keep AM humming, this bill is a gift to iHeart, Cumulus and the nation’s other corporate radio broadcasters. In that light, shouldn’t the networks finally pay a fair rate for the music that has kept millions of consumers tuned to their stations since radios were first installed in cars? 

David Newhoff, an artists’ rights advocate, writes the blog, The Illusion of More and is the author of the book, “Who Invented Oscar Wilde: The Photograph at the Center of Modern American Copyright.”