Copyright Law at the Border: Why a Quiet EU Proposal Could Pull $300M From US Artists

Last spring I pulled a royalty statement for a track of mine that had been licensed to a mid-size European retail chain — background music, in-store, the kind of use that plays a few thousand times a day across dozens of locations. I wanted to see one number: what the recording earned from public performance in the EU versus what it earned back home.

The home number was zero. Not small. Zero. Because under US copyright law, a sound recording played over the radio or in a store generates a public performance royalty for the songwriter and publisher, but not for the performer or the label that made the master. The EU line existed — real euros, collected by a local society — but a footnote flagged that a chunk of it might not reach me at all, depending on how a rule I'd never heard of got interpreted. That footnote is the whole story of what's happening right now at the intersection of trade policy and copyright.

What "national treatment" actually means here

Two words carry this entire dispute: national treatment and reciprocity. They sound like bureaucratic filler. They are worth roughly $300 million a year.

National treatment is the old rule: a country pays foreign artists the same way it pays its own. If a US recording gets played in a French café, France collects and pays out as if the track were French, regardless of what France's artists would get if the situation were reversed. Reciprocity flips that logic — a country pays foreign artists only to the extent that their home country would pay French artists back. Under reciprocity, the fact that the US collects no public performance royalty for recordings at home becomes a reason for Europe to withhold payment going the other way.

That distinction is not theoretical. In 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided a case commonly cited as RAAP (Recorded Artists Actors Performers), which addressed whether EU societies could restrict payments to performers from non-EU countries that don't grant the same rights. The ruling constrained member states' freedom to unilaterally limit those payments — but it also lit the fuse on a broader policy question about how the EU handles performers from places like the United States, where the reciprocal right simply doesn't exist.

The US is the outlier by design. Among OECD economies, it is effectively alone in not granting a general public performance right for sound recordings played on terrestrial radio and in commercial spaces. That gap is decades old and domestically contested. What's new is that the gap has become a lever someone on the other side of the Atlantic can pull.

The coalition's case, and the number

Earlier this year a coalition of US music organizations — a broad slate spanning labels, performer unions, and publisher and artist groups — pressed the US Trade Representative to formally oppose an EU proposal that would move payment for recorded music toward a reciprocity model. Their central estimate: American performers and rights holders stand to lose close to $300 million annually if the shift goes through.

The mechanics of that loss are worth being precise about. Under a reciprocity regime, EU collecting societies could reduce or withhold the public performance income they currently distribute to US recordings, on the grounds that the US doesn't reciprocate. Money that flows today would slow or stop. The coalition's framing leans on national treatment as a stabilizing principle — a rules-based default that lets a track earn abroad without every country auditing what every other country does at home. Replace that with case-by-case reciprocity, they argue, and you get a fragmented system: more administrative friction, more uncertainty about what any given master will actually collect, and a structural penalty aimed squarely at US rights holders because of a domestic policy choice most working artists never made.

There's also a trade-discrimination argument underneath the royalty math. The coalition's position is that singling out US recordings for reduced treatment functions as a barrier — a targeted disadvantage that trade agreements are supposed to prevent. Whether the USTR takes that up as a formal trade matter is the open question.

What the other side says

European trade bodies have pushed back on both the framing and the figure. Independent-label groups on the EU side have historically argued that the imbalance runs the other way — that European performers and producers are the ones underpaid, and that the numbers at stake are smaller than the US coalition claims. Estimates floated from the European side have landed closer to nine figures in euros rather than the US coalition's dollar total, and the underlying position is straightforward: if the US wants full national treatment abroad, it can grant a public performance right for recordings at home. Reciprocity, in that telling, is not discrimination. It's symmetry.

Both things can be true at once. US rights holders can face a real, quantifiable loss, and the loss can trace directly back to a hole in American copyright law that Europe didn't create. The dispute is less a clean villain story than a standoff between two countries that pay recorded music very differently and have now bumped into each other at the collection plate.

The wider drift

This isn't happening in isolation. Inside the US, there have been repeated legislative attempts to close the domestic gap — bills that would establish a terrestrial radio performance right for recordings, backed by high-profile artist testimony and cosponsored across the aisle at various points. None has yet become law, and the broadcasting lobby has fought each one hard.

Meanwhile, other markets keep tightening their own frameworks. Japan, for instance, has been moving through copyright reforms that expand how recorded-music rights get administered. The pattern is consistent: most developed economies treat the public performance of a recording as something the performer and the master owner get paid for. The US remains the conspicuous exception, and that exception is exactly what makes American rights holders vulnerable when a trading partner decides to stop absorbing the difference.

What it means if you make or own recordings

If you're a US-based artist, label, or rights administrator, the practical read is this: a meaningful stream of income you may currently take for granted — foreign public performance royalties on your masters — is being reframed abroad as conditional rather than guaranteed. It is not gone. It is not certain to shrink by the coalition's headline figure. But the legal default that has quietly paid US recordings for years is now something someone is proposing to renegotiate, and the leverage the other side holds comes from a gap in US law that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.

For advocates, that reframes the domestic radio-royalty fight from a fairness argument into a trade-defense one. Every year the US doesn't grant a home performance right for recordings is another year the reciprocity argument gains force in Brussels. The two files — foreign and domestic — are now the same file.

Back to the statement

I went back to that royalty document with the footnote. The EU line was real money for work I did years ago that still plays in rooms I'll never stand in. The zero in the US column had always felt like an old, settled quirk — annoying, but stable.

It isn't stable anymore. That footnote was the tremor before the number moves. The $300 million the coalition is trying to protect isn't a windfall anyone is asking for; it's the payment that already exists, now hanging on which of two words — national treatment or reciprocity — wins a fight most artists will never see.