This year, in communities all across America, bands will strike up "God Bless the U.S.A." and crowds will rise to their feet.It will happen at firework shows and small-town parades, at ballgames and backyard cookouts, as our country marks 250 years.I wrote that song more than 40 years ago on a tour bus, between shows, running 300 dates a year.
Since then, I've performed it in every state of our union and all across the globe for our troops who are serving a long way from home.I have never once gotten tired of it.But here is something most people do not know.
Every time an AM/FM radio station plays that recording, the station makes money, but the artists and musicians who recorded it make nothing.Not me or the other musicians who performed it with me.
A radio company can broadcast "God Bless the U.S.A." a thousand times, sell advertising against every play, and never pay the people who made it.That is not because of some deal we signed away.
It's because of a loophole in the law that Congress has left open for about a hundred years.AARON TIPPIN SAYS PATRIOTISM IS 'VERY STRONG IN AMERICA' AHEAD OF FORT CAMPBELL 4TH OF JULY SHOWI love radio.Radio has been part of my life and my career for as long as I can remember.
This is not about punishing local stations or silencing the voices that connect communities.It is about asking the biggest broadcast companies in America to follow the same basic principle every other platform already follows: when you use music to make money, the people who made that music deserve to share in it.This is a basic American idea: when someone's work creates value, they should be paid fairly for it.When a farmer grows a crop, it's his to sell.
When a factory turns out a product, the people who built it get paid.A recording should be no different.The men and women who make a recording create real value in that recording.
But AM/FM radio has had a free pass since the early days of broadcasting, and the biggest broadcasting corporations in t...