Graham Davies recently left the Ivors Academy in the UK to take over the Digital Media Association in the US.  I don’t know Mr. Davies and maybe if I did I’d understand the attraction to the life styles of the fully vested.  

But I don’t.  At all.  You could not find two more completely opposite worlds.  Ivors is steeped in  the constant struggle of artists and songwriters to withstand the streaming onslaught and the Googleization of everything.  DiMA   members—Amazon, Apple, Feed.FM, Spotify and YouTube–profit from streaming and the commodification of artists and songwriters, or use it to drive profits from data harvesting or other business lines through their music honeypot.  And they do it by leveraging their multi-trillion dollar valuations that are not shared with creators. For example, DiMA members (all run by very, very rich men in the Silicon Valley elite) bring an army of hundreds of lawyers to the Copyright Royalty Board to crush songwriters who are forced to share lawyers with the publishers to fight over scraps.  All to yield a royalty that starts with many zeros. Grotesque.

Even so, let’s take a few minutes to jot down a cheat sheet of items Mr. Davies may want to focus on as he comes to his new job.  Doing so may also help us identify the overwhelming market power of DiMA’s price-setting members and ask whether it is even a good idea to allow this exclusive club to exist.  Perhaps we can answer the question of whether the richest corporations and government contractors in commercial history since the British East India Company should be allowed to form a league to leverage the compulsory mechanical license.  A league that combines their market power with their client government’s bootheel for which Mr. Davies is now the public face.

This is not to discount Mr. Davies’s many accomplishments at Ivors.  But that was then and this is now.  

Here are a few things that Mr. Davies could do to improve relations between DIMA members and the creator community. I doubt that I’m telling him anything he doesn’t already know quite well, but consider it a reminder.

1.  Open Direct Dialog with Creator Groups in the US and Internationally on AI principles in line with Human Artistry Campaign and Universal/YouTube AI Music Incubator

2.  Observe a KYC Minimum Viable Data Program to Clean Up The MLC Disaster and the Hundreds of Millions in the Streaming Black Box

3.  Help Songwriters Make a Living and Stop Payment Games (like Pandora) 

4.  Stop the Dilatory Overlawyering Excesses at the CRB, Especially Insane Discovery Requests and Refusing a Cost of Living Adjustment on Compulsory Rates

5.  Stop Using Music as a Honeypot to Scrape Fan Behavioral Data and Snoop, Especially on Kids

Mr. Davies could pick any one of these items or propose his own.  I’m sure he’s thought about it and I’d love to hear how his appointment is not going to just be more of the same. And see the proof.

Since DIMA members and their confederates have a huge effect on creators of all kinds in the world, it’s worth paying attention to Mr. Davies.  It’s also worth setting expectations about whether any of his members are interested in Mr. Davies making DiMA more pro-creator than it has ever been.  It’s not that his members can’t do it or afford it.  These are people who have the means and political clout to do damn near anything they want from hanging their name on Barcelona football club to riding a phallic rocket into Earth orbit. Don’t you think if they wanted to be more pro-creator they could have done so long ago?  So by hiring Mr. Davies, it feels like DiMA members want a second chance.

Unfortunately for Mr. Davies, DiMA already got their second chances long ago and the thanks we got for it is brand sponsored piracy and the Music Modernization Act fiasco.  Not to mention hundreds of millions in unpaid royalties (aka grand theft), much of which is still sitting in the coffers of DiMA’s Mechanical Licensing Collective where it will no doubt stay until either they are forced to pay it out or someone goes to prison.

And then there’s the AI catastrophe.  It is important to realize that there is considerable overlap between the biggest DiMA members and the AI issues that are already plaguing creators in all categories as the strike should have made clear to one and all.  

Let’s just say that I’m wrong.  Let’s say that we can safely ignore 25 years of organizational history (and inertia) and that elves and unicorns do reign supreme handing out kisses and straight count royalties to all comers.  And let’s say that DiMA members actually do give a good goddamn what the head of DiMA thinks about anything at all. 

I think Mr. Davies will find that if he’s got a genuine interest in improving DiMA’s relations with creators, there will be creators genuinely interested in improving relations with him.  And actually fixing streaming.

Then it’s on him to bring his members along.  I, for one, will believe that when I see the receipts for such Herculean labor. I think he’ll definitely need friends.

And you know what they say about friends in Washington.