Via FAS – Money for Something: Music Licensing in the 21st Century, Dana A. Scherer, Analyst in Telecommunications. January 19, 2016.

“The laws that determine who pays whom in the digital world were written, by and large, at a time when music was primarily performed via radio broadcasts or distributed through physical media (such as sheet music and phonograph records) , and when each of these forms of music delivery represented a distinct channel with unique characteristics. With the emergence of the Internet, Congress updated some copyright laws in the 1990s. It applied one set of legal provisions to digital services it viewed as akin to radio broadcasts and another set to digital services it viewed as akin to physical media. Since that time consumers have increasingly been consuming music via digital services that incorporate attributes of both radio and physical media. However, companies that compete in enabling consumers to access music may face very different costs to license music, depending on the technology they use and the features they offer. These differences in technology and features also affect the amount of money received by songwriters, performers, music publishers, and record companies.”