The European Composer & Songwriter Alliance has raised an interesting question to Congressman Doug Collins in a recent letter regarding the Music Modernization Act:

A few other questions that are of concern to songwriters: Where is the business plan for the collective? A century of practice is to be changed without even a business plan that the governed have a chance to review?

This is, of course, an excellent point.  The controversial Music Modernization Act creates a new mechanical royalty collective in the U.S. that follows the curious approach of essentially codifying a chunk of what would normally be found in a combination of organizational formation documents, by-laws or a voting agreement.   The bill mandates a fixed number of governing boards and even designates the category of person who can fill board seats, both voting and nonvoting.  (And any change in those boards would literally require an Act of Congress.)

There is considerable detail in the bill about the new collective with two major exceptions:  No one is tasked with creating a business plan for the collective’s operation as the ECSA officers note in their letter to Rep. Collins.  Neither is there any hint at what the initial operating budget would be or what it would cover.

Good news–this is an easy fix.  I would worry that given that it’s government work, a business plan for the collective will come from one of the big consulting firms at a high cost–guaranteeing that no one who is both unconflicted and who has actually done work in the area will come within a county mile of the project.  I am not the right person to ask about the big consulting firms as I’ve found their work product to be consistently worthless over the years.  That brings the joy of consistency, but the disappointment of overpaying for useless work.

The budget should also be established for the first few years, if for no other reason than the digital services are supposed to pay for the collective under the MMA.  If the cost is $100,000,000, you don’t want to find out that the services will only pay $500,000 once the bill is passed and it’s too late.  If there is a meeting of the minds on the operating costs, it’s being kept pretty quiet inside the smoke filled rooms.  If there isn’t a meeting of the minds, DiMA could shut down the collective as fast as a stop payment.

But still, it’s better to have a plan than to have no plan at all which seems to be the current state of affairs–abandoning a “century of practice” as our European friends remind us.