ASSOCIATIONS

Danielle Aguirre EXECUTIVE VP/GENERAL COUNSEL, NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION

Social media companies have shed their reputation as licensing backwaters and engaged with music rights holders — with one notable exception: the platform formally known as Twitter, now known as X. That impasse could change after the $250 million copyright infringement lawsuit that 17 music publishers brought against the company in a Tennessee federal court in June 2023. “Twitter was one of the last, largest digital companies that refused to license music despite benefiting from a substantial amount of music on its platform,” Aguirre says. “It was time to hold Twitter to account, and NMPA spent over a year developing evidence to demonstrate Twitter’s massive copyright infringement.”

Advice on AI “Educate yourself about how generative AI works. Understand how your copyrights are being used by generative AI companies, and don’t be afraid to protect your copyrights where necessary.”

Ken Doroshow

CHIEF LEGAL OFFICER, RIAA

In April 2023, “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song written and produced by TikTok user ghostwriter977 and performed by AI-generated replicas of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, set off alarms in the music industry. By the following month, Doroshow was speaking at one of the first formal proceedings — a U.S. Copyright Office “listening session” — dedicated to the issue of protecting artists from nefarious uses of generative AI. “My team has done dozens of filings, meetings and briefings across the executive and legislative branches as well as in state capitols,” Doroshow says. “[We’re] laying down an intellectual architecture for the ethical development of AI in ways that promote human creativity and maximize the benefits of responsible AI for all.”

If I quit law, I would “Play my guitar all day and night.”

Ryan McWhinnie

VP OF BUSINESS AND LEGAL AFFAIRS, MERLIN

A key to McWhinnie’s work at digital licensing firm Merlin is finding new approaches to the pro rata royalty model with his streaming partners that will drive more value to music creators while ensuring appropriate protections. Whether it’s Deezer’s “artist-centric” royalty distribution system, Spotify’s new “track monetization” approach or SoundCloud’s Fan-Powered Royalties model, McWhinnie says his role is to “ensure that these initiatives accrue to the benefit of our members, their artists and the incredible music they create while ensuring that these moves do not disintermediate independents.”

Most pressing issue “Tackling artificial streaming and fraudulent content is an incredibly important issue facing our industry. At Merlin, we are laser-focused and deploying significant resources on doing all we can to combat these corrosive issues, which penalize legitimate actors and pull monies away from artists and the rights holders who invest in their careers.”