Not directly affecting Part 15 (yet) however, at this point terrestrial radio, including Part 15 does not pay performers or labels, etc just song writers but SoundExchange and others are working hard to change that. The NAB continues to fight this, and in this case their fight is also our fight.
Also interesting:
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/5-things-to-know-before-renewing-your-music-licenses.html
TIB
Canada already pays both performance and song copyright fees (as does much of the rest of the world), so I suspect that all the NAB is going to be able to do is to delay performance fees.
The tradeoff here in Canada is that there are a great many more songs & performances that are in the public domain due to less restrictive historical copyright laws. These have been tighened up recently to bring Canada up to par with the U.S., but anything that had fallen into the public domain stays in the public domain.
The public domain here doesn't affect those that want to play relatively modern music (anything released past the mid 60s). But it does offer potential musical formats for those that are primarily interested in vintage music - vrtually all classical recordings released prior to 1966, as well as select pop and jazz records released prior to 1966 and whose song creators passd away prior to 1965. There is also a huge body of Old Time Radio that is in the public domain.
My personal opinions are that music died in the late 60s (except for the New Wave movement in the late 70s & early 80s), so I'm perfectly happy broadcasting public domain stuff.
what radio stations can do as a protest and get everybody to do it at once is to Simply recite the alphabet over and over and over and say this is what will happen if the music industry gets their way. You will hear nothing but the alphabet 24 hours a day with a little news and weather programming then back to reciting the alphabet. Because the alphabet is about the only thing that is not copyrighted. If all the stations did this and did it for a few days to a week I think the public would get the message and this nonsense would end.
Actually, if all the stations did this and did it for a few days to a week, the public would get the message and just stop listening to the radio. We're already battling streaming music and portable players, and doing what you suggest just hands them the victory.
I know I would stop listening, and I'm a pro broadcaster.
Unfortunately, radio stations are caught between a rock & a hard place.
They're struggling (sometimes not so much in certain markets) to keep listeners. The licensing bodies know that. So they'll attempt to squeeze all they can out of what they see is a captive market.
Stations will be forced to 1) pay 2) close up shop or 3) change to meet the new economics.
I quite honestly can't see that change would be bad. Perhaps look more to independent music, which would give more musicians (many of them very talented) air time. Or play less music and more talk. By the latter, I don't mean the mindless chatter of DJ's who feel they're the center of the universe, but intelligent talk programming. Maybe even bring back radio plays (with suitably generic background music).
Who knows, the greed of the licensing bodies may usher in a whole new era in radio!
People won't stand for it and Radio will be the wild west and it will get ugly.