T Bone Burnett: Treading on Hallowed Ground – Google, the Ryman, and The Future of Nashville Music

If a merciless, loveless binary conglomerate simply occupied the Ryman one day and started putting on shows, charging admission, and keeping all the money for itself, they’d have to answer to a lot of folks. The very idea of someone nakedly co-opting the Mother Church and cashing in on its legacy, beauty, and epochal sound is, of course, absurd.

And yet, that’s what Google does to songwriters, artists, musicians, publishers, and record companies every single day. Its YouTube operation hosts millions of unlicensed copies of our work without any right or permission whatsoever, and it earns billions selling ads targeted at the often unknowing fans who listen to these pirate works.  It’s as much an abuse of our work and an affront to the legacy and history of Nashville music as usurping gatekeeper rights over the Ryman stage.

And even when YouTube licenses music, it pays grotesquely below market royalty rates, tossing us scraps and pocket change on a “take it or leave it” basis right out of the Sopranos. Don’t want to license your work at YouTube’s cut-rate rates? That’s fine, but unlicensed copies remain plastered all over the service anyhow.

How does Google get away with this?

The law doesn’t compel YouTube to keep unlicensed copies of our work off its site, and it doesn’t prevent them from selling advertising and earning millions every day off those clicks. All it requires is that, when creators give YouTube notice of illegal copies of our work on its site, it takes them down in a reasonably timely way.  And if the scofflaws immediately re-post that same copy of our work on YouTube, or 10,000 copies, well YouTube is happy to take those down too just as soon as the creator or copyright owner sends in another 10,000 notices.

This law – called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor – needs to be changed. It was designed for a “You’ve Got Mail” internet with few websites and before anyone imagined that companies like YouTube would hide behind its broad protections to actively earn millions of dollars on the “float” period between the posting of an illegal copy of our work and the sending of a notice to take it down.

Everyone has a role in upholding the value of music

When Congress passed this law, it was trying to protect passive internet providers and website companies that simply carried someone else’s data, not corporate titans that actively profit from and facilitate mass piracy.

I don’t know how Google justifies twisting the law and pillaging our creative blood, toil, sweat and tears in this way. And I doubt I could ever find my way past its army of flacks, lobbyists, front groups, and bought and paid for politicians to ask. But it is clear that, whatever tales they tell themselves to sleep at night don’t mean much to the next generation of songwriters, artists, and musicians who struggle every day to choose between heeding the inspiration and call of their creative work and meeting the basic needs of their families.

And nowhere is the blow harder felt than here in Nashville, where the number of working songwriters has plummeted in recent years and performers and musicians are standing on the outside of a streaming music boom that’s enriching Silicon Valley while leaving Music City out in the cold.

Google seems to know it has a problem here in Tennessee. That’s why it’s out in the community sponsoring musicians’ workshops, funding “digital inclusion fellowships,” and making big promises about wiring the city with low cost internet – even as local pastors question whether all of our citizens including those in minority communities will get access.  And unions question the company’s push for shortcuts and special rules for its projects that will cost us local jobs.

But for music creators, this is all a sideshow, a corporate feel good effort designed to yank our gaze away from the basic facts – Google is putting all its power and might into killing legal reforms artists and songwriters need to survive.

But we still have a voice.

We must continue to urge Congress to reform the DMCA so the next generation of songwriters, artists, and performers can thrive. We must continue to look skeptically at Google’s effort to paper over issues and distract our institutions and communities from its unfair exploitation of our work.

And we must pursue all avenues and remedies in Congress and the courts – like the landmark win on songwriter royalties that rejected the Google-friendly DOJ’s bogus ruling on “fractional” licensing of our work.

The Ryman still stands a 120 years after its dedication because the music community has defended and supported it.  And today we must bring the same vigilance and dedication to the world of digital music so that it too can be a thriving, hallowed home to great music for generations yet to come.

T Bone Burnett is an award-winning singer, songwriter and producer whose numerous recognitions include 13 Grammy Awards, an Oscar and a Golden Globe. He is a member of the Content Creators Coalition’s Advisory Board.