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“Dear Curtis”: Gary Shapiro Asks NAB to Drop AM Bill

Head of CTA threatens to ramp up the fight over performance royalties

A man smiles at the camera. He wears a blue suit jacket and an open-necked white business shirt.
Gary Shapiro

If U.S. broadcasters continue to push for a law requiring AM radio in new cars, the consumer electronics industry will press Congress to pass performance royalties for radio.

That’s one of the takeaways from a letter that Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, emailed to Curtis LeGeyt, the president/CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters.

It wouldn’t be the first time CTA has given support to performance royalties, but Shapiro has brought the issue up again while urging LeGeyt to reconsider NAB’s support for the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.

NAB is unmoved.

“Serious concerns”

In his “Dear Curtis” email, obtained by Radio World, Shapiro reiterated CTA’s opposition to the bill, which is expected to be reintroduced in the new Congress.

(Read the letter.)

His tone was friendly: “For most of my career, NAB and CTA have worked together to promote innovative technologies that benefit the world and our members, including NAB and CES show exhibitors,” Shapiro wrote.

But he sought to connect the AM issue with the longstanding debate over performance royalties.

“As you know, AM and FM are the only forms of radio that don’t pay performers for their work. We join others who believe this is fundamentally unfair. If legislation to mandate AM radio moves forward this congressional session, CTA will urge that the legislation also require AM and FM radio broadcasters to pay performance royalties to artists.”

The AM bill received considerable support during the last session of Congress, but Shapiro focused on what he called “serious concerns” among congressional leaders.

“These include questions about the ‘public safety’ reasoning for the mandate. Very few Americans actually receive emergency alerts via AM radio in their cars, with a CTA study showing only 1% of U.S. adults heard an emergency alert test on AM radio.”

Shapiro said that if NAB continues to support the bill, it should release statistics about how many AM stations have full-time and around-the-clock local staff. “We understand that most AM stations do not have full-time employees, raising questions about their capacity to fulfill this role in real time. If that’s not the case, I am happy to be corrected.”

He said it was “disheartening” to find that CTA and NAB were “at odds over a Luddite proposal mandating aging technology in modern vehicles.”

NAB responds

Radio World invited comment from the NAB.

Senior Vice President of Communications Alex Siciliano gave no indication that the letter would change NAB’s position.

Instead he replied by pointing to a commentary written by Shapiro that appeared on the Vox website in 2017:

“As Gary Shapiro has made clear, radio is a vital lifeline in times of emergency, as was the case when he was caught in a massive windstorm and power outage in Napa,” Siciliano said in an email.

“He noted that ‘we make ourselves incredibly vulnerable as individuals and as a society by relying on tech without some redundancy — also known as backup capabilities.’ Shapiro urged that every ‘group and facility should have a portable, solar or hand-cranked radio.’ We could not agree more.”

During the recent Los Angeles wildfires, Siciliano continued, “AM radio provided critical, real-time information when power outages and cell networks failed. AM’s lifeline role is a primary reason more than 330 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle supported this legislation in the last Congress. Innovation and public safety can coexist, but not at the expense of leaving Americans vulnerable in times of crisis.”

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