“The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.”
– David Bowie, 2002
In 1994, Stanford copyright scholar Paul Goldstein coined a phrase that captured the imagination of anyone following the collision between music and technology. He foresaw the arrival of the “Celestial Jukebox” – a future in which every song ever recorded would be available instantly, anywhere, from a digital cloud. Three decades later, that vision has come to pass. We can stream millions of tracks on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon. The jukebox is celestial.
But Bowie’s prophecy that copyright would vanish in the process proved wrong. Instead, copyright law has persisted, adapting – sometimes awkwardly, sometimes elegantly – to every new medium.
What follows is a tour through the architecture of the business side of music copyright. To try to tie it all together I’ve used Dolly Parton’s song I Will Always Love You. My thanks to tech entrepreneur and veteran music disruptor Jeff Price, who used this song for this purpose in a presentation I saw years ago.
I Will Always Love You – One Song, Two Copyrights
When Dolly Parton wrote and originally recorded I Will Always Love You in 1973, she created two distinct copyrights. The first, in the musical work – the melody and lyrics – was hers to keep through her own publishing company, Owe-Par Publishing. The second, in the sound recording, belonged to RCA Records, which released her performance under contract with her.
The fact that most music has two separate copyrights – the composition and the sound recording – is the starting point for almost every legal question in the music business. Legal ownership of the copyright in the composition is often referred to as the publishing rights.
When Whitney Houston recorded her 1992 version of I Will Always Love You for the film The Bodyguard, she and her label, Sony Records, created a new sound recording – a separate copyright from Dolly Parton’s original 1974 recording. But the musical composition – the underlying melody and lyrics – remained Dolly Parton’s property through her publishing company.
Public Performances and the PROs
One of the exclusive rights held by a copyright owner is the right of public performance. Dolly Parton owns the public performance right in her composition.
Every time I Will Always Love You plays in public – whether in a restaurant, on radio, on television, or through a digital stream – that is a public performance, and Dolly Parton is owed a royalty. The U.S. system for collecting these payments relies on four performing rights organizations, or “PROs”: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR. Each PRO offers a “blanket license” that allows a venue or broadcaster to use an entire catalog of songs without negotiating with each songwriter individually.
Under these licenses, venues, broadcasters, and digital services pay royalties to the performing rights organizations, which in turn distribute royalties to the songwriters and publishers they represent. It is a quiet but remarkably effective system of collective licensing – largely invisible to the public – that ensures the creators of songs, often overshadowed by the artists who perform them, are compensated whenever their music is publicly performed.
Mechanical Royalties and the Compulsory License
Suppose you want to record and sell your own version of I Will Always Love You, referred to as a “cover.” Do you need Dolly’s permission? Surprisingly, you don’t. Section 115 of the Copyright Act grants a compulsory mechanical license. Once a song has been released to the public, anyone may record and distribute a cover version as long as they pay the owner of the composition a statutory royalty – currently 12.4 cents per copy for songs under five minutes.
When Whitney Houston’s label, Sony, decided to record a cover of I Will Always Love You for The Bodyguard, it obtained a mechanical license covering the use of Dolly Parton’s composition. In most cases, this process is handled by the Harry Fox Agency, which serves as an intermediary between record labels and music publishers, collecting and distributing mechanical royalties. Because the license is compulsory under §115 of the Copyright Act, Parton could not refuse permission for the recording, but she remained entitled to receive the royalties generated by every reproduction and public performance of the song.
The system may sound bureaucratic, but it dates back to 1909, when Congress first created compulsory licenses to encourage the spread of new technologies – from player pianos to phonographs. The goal was to balance artistic control with public access, and it remains a defining feature of American music law.
Covers and the Question of Control
The concept of a compulsory license is not without controversy, and not all artists agree with it. Bob Dylan admired Jimi Hendrix’s transformative cover of All Along the Watchtower, saying that he now performs it “as a tribute to Hendrix.” Prince, on the other hand, resented the very idea. “There’s this thing called the compulsory license law,” he once complained, “which allows artists, through record companies, to take your music, at will, without your permission. And that doesn’t exist in any other art form.”
Prince was right about the uniqueness of music’s legal regime. No one can compel an author to let others rewrite a novel, or a filmmaker to let others reshoot a movie. But musicians have long accepted that their songs can – and will – be covered. It’s a reminder that copyright in music has always existed in tension with the culture of performance and reinvention.
The Sync License and the Bodyguard Deal
When The Bodyguard film featured Whitney Houston’s rendition of I Will Always Love You, two different sets of rights had to be cleared. The film’s producers needed a synchronization, or “sync,” license from Dolly Parton for the musical composition, and a master-use license from Sony Records for Houston’s sound recording. Unlike the statutory license for sound recordings, sync licenses must be negotiated and often are highly lucrative.
Parton’s ownership of her publishing rights gave her a decisive advantage. Early in her career, she founded her own publishing company, an unusual step for a young performer in the early 1970s. That decision gave her control over how her songs were used and allowed her to negotiate directly when Hollywood came calling. She later recalled how she once turned down Elvis Presley’s request to record I Will Always Love You because Colonel Tom Parker (Presley’s infamous manager) demanded half her publishing rights. It was, she said, one of the hardest business decisions of her life. Reportedly, keeping the publishing rights to that song has earned her over $10 million.
Streaming and the Music Modernization Act
The arrival of digital streaming shattered the clean boundaries that once separated reproduction from performance. Every stream is both: a reproduction of the composition and a public performance. But the performance rights differ between the two copyrights. For the musical composition, any public performance – whether on terrestrial radio, in a restaurant, or through a stream – generates a royalty for the songwriter. For the sound recording, however, the public performance right is narrower. It applies only to digital transmissions like streaming and internet radio, not to traditional AM/FM broadcasts.
This means that when Houston’s cover of I Will Always Love You plays on Spotify, Dolly Parton earns performance royalties as the songwriter, and Whitney Houston’s estate and Sony earn performance royalties as owners of that particular sound recording. But when the same song plays on terrestrial radio, only Dolly gets paid for the performance.
Before 2018, digital platforms like Spotify and Apple Music were expected to locate every songwriter and pay them directly. The result was predictable chaos – and a wave of class actions for unpaid royalties. Congress responded with the Music Modernization Act (MMA), signed into law in 2018. Among its provisions was the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), a centralized database of musical works and their owners. Under the new system, digital streaming services like Spotify pay their mechanical royalties to the MLC, which then distributes them to registered songwriters and publishers.
Dolly Parton’s MMA registration of I Will Always Love You is here.
The MMA simplified life for the streaming platforms but shifted the burden of compliance to the creators themselves. If a songwriter fails to register with the MLC, they receive nothing – and cannot later sue for unpaid royalties. The law thus trades friction for finality, reinforcing the old rule of copyright: you can’t get paid for rights you can’t prove you own.
Modern Lessons: Taylor Swift and Peloton
The principles that governed Dolly Parton’s song still shape today’s industry battles. Taylor Swift’s well-publicized falling out with Big Machine Records illustrates the same fault line between composition and recording. When Big Machine Records, which owned the master recordings of her first six albums, was sold to investors Swift lost the opportunity to control or reacquire her sound recordings but retained her rights in the musical composition. Her response – re-recording the albums as Taylor’s Versions – is both a legal and symbolic act of reclamation, asserting the continuing power of authorship in an industry that has often undervalued it.
A few years earlier, the fitness company Peloton learned a different lesson. It was sued for using thousands of songs in workout videos without securing synchronization licenses from the publishers. The case settled quietly, but it demonstrated how easily businesses operating in the digital realm can stumble over the invisible tripwires of copyright law.
Dolly’s Long Game
Half a century after she wrote I Will Always Love You, Dolly Parton continues to collect royalties from her composition in multiple ways. She, or her estate, will continue to earn these royalties until 2069, 95 years from first publication. Every radio spin, every concert, every cover version, every download, every stream, and every appearance in film or television generates a payment. Her insistence on retaining her publishing rights in the 1970s – long before “owning your masters” became a rallying cry – has made her one of the wealthiest and most respected figures in popular music. It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of how copyright literacy can translate into enduring creative and financial control.
Coda: Bowie’s Prediction Revisited
Bowie’s prediction that copyright would disappear within a decade now feels almost quaint. Yet he was right about one thing: digital technology transformed everything about how we experience music. What it didn’t destroy was the basic legal structure that allows artists to profit from their work. Copyright law, born in the age of sheet music and phonographs, has proved remarkably adaptable.
At its core remains a simple question – one that every lawyer, artist, and technologist must still answer:
Who owns the song?