re: income averaging....songwriters were at one time allowed to do so - there are still a few entities allowed to use income averaging (farmers for example). The problem is that if you have a song recorded, the majority of the royalties are paid in a 1 year period. That means you could go from making $20,000 one year to $275k the next, and then back down to around $30k the next. Lump on self-employment tax, plus the higher tax bracket, and you can pay as much as 49% of the royalties in taxes in the big year. It was a much more fair system to allow that tax liability to be averaged and spread across a few years (I think it was five, I don't recall exactly). I was under the impression that book authors were still allowed to do so, but maybe I'm incorrect on that.

I'm of the opinion that the arbitration process I mentioned could happen if the political stars align correctly. The MMA that was passed is a hybrid of a bill we've been trying to get through for over a decade. Once all the pieces fell in place, it happened relatively quickly.

Part of the issue that the music industry has in DC is our own internal bickering and self-serving interests have made politicians leery of sticking their necks out too far on any piece of legislation that pertains to it, unless their is industry-wide consensus for it. That type of consensus is oft times impossible to get - what is good for songwriters may not be good for publishers, or what is good for songwriter/publishers may not be good for record labels, which may not be good for streaming services, etc.

The good thing, at least for the prospects of an arbitration process, is that nobody in the music industry likes litigation, especially when it's a frivolous claim. So I don't suspect there would be any industry opposition to it, which gives it a better shot than it would otherwise have.

You are absolutely correct about the glacial speed of getting legislation passed. A number of years ago we were able to get a correction made to the capital gains tax code. Songwriters were being unfairly taxed when selling their publishing shares of their works - instead of it being a property sale, taxed at the capital gains tax rate, it was treated as standard income and writers had to pay regular income tax on it. It was a pretty obvious mistake and there was no opposition in DC about changing it. It still took 7 years to get it done.

http://www.rogerbrownsongs.com
http://www.nashvillesongwriters.com/roger-brown