Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Message from Neil Portnow - and the battle continues...

Today, I write to you to simply say "thank you."

Our quest to expand radio performance royalties to all music creators has reached significant milestones during this Congressional session, with the most immediate result a historic "yes" vote from the key House subcommittee that oversees copyright. This was the result in no small measure to the countless Recording Academy members who participated in this grassroots campaign. From those who testified before Congress, to those who came to Washington to lobby, to those who used our Advocacy Action @ GRAMMY.com email system-your efforts persuaded many key legislators of the merits of our objective: basic fairness for music creators.

The goal to have a performance royalty for sound recordings has been sought by recording professionals for decades. Since The Recording Academy co-founded The musicFIRST Coalition with other key industry groups, we've made more progress in the past 12 months than our community has in the past 80 years. There's still much to be done and success will take more time. But we have three things on our side: the fairness of our objective, our momentum in Congress, and you, our Recording Academy members who've become engaged activists.

To learn more about this campaign and our other music advocacy, please see our latest issue of Capitol Tracks by cutting and pasting http://www.grammy.com/PDFs/CapTrx.pdf in to your browser.

Thank you, and keep up the good fight.
Kind regards,
Neil Portnow

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