H.R. 8994: Protect Working Musicians Act of 2026

This bill allows certain individual music creator owners to collectively negotiate music licensing terms with dominant online music distribution platforms or companies engaged in development or deployment of generative artificial intelligence, including the right to collectively refuse to license their music to such platforms or companies.

Individual music creator owners include musicians, producers, and technicians who own the copyright to a recording and either (1) earned less than $1 million in associated revenues during the prior year, or (2) qualify as a record production and distribution small business.

Dominant online music distribution platforms include interactive online services with annual revenues from music distribution of more than $100 million. Generative artificial intelligence includes artificial intelligence systems that are capable of producing novel text, video, images, audio, and other media based on prompts or other forms of inputted data.

Written by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress.