MPTF’s Journey to Resurgence: Reflecting on a Pivotal Era and Transitioning to New Leadership

September 1, 2025

Dan Beck  -  Trustee, Music Performance Trust Fund

In June 2013, I accepted the role of trustee for the Music Performance Trust Fund (MPTF). Two months prior, I had never heard of this organization, its history or its purpose. The MPTF was not in a good place. It had suffered through roughly 13 years of declining revenue due to the digital disruption—the canyon between physical record sales and streaming revenue. In my initial research, I discovered that the reduced grant budget was still doing good things in communities throughout North America. And musicians were being paid for these admission-free performances.

I discovered a small team that had suffered through the extreme erosion of resources and continued to maintain the integrity of the grant process and immediacy in getting checks out to pay musicians. The staff had been downsized from 18 people to four in the previous two years. The future looked unquestionably bleak.

There wasn’t much we could do in those early days as our revenue continued to drop to an unsustainable $665,000 in 2015. We tried to keep the grant budget at a meaningful level. We distributed $497,000 in grants that year as our reserves continued to shrink.

Fortunately, the AFM and the major label signatories found common ground and injected streaming revenue into the AFM and Employers Pension Fund, Sound Recording Special Payments Fund, and MPTF. Our reserves improved. Our grant budget steadily increased, and we continued to modernize the fund’s operation.

We evolved from roughly 1,700 performance grants in 2015 to approximately 4,800 in our most recent two years, averaging $4.8 million in distribution. Nearly all went into the pockets of professional musicians in the US and Canada. This was all done with the same small staff. The AFM union locals worked hard to rebuild their event calendars, and it was an enormous shared success that we all should celebrate.

However, the road wasn’t entirely smooth from 2015 to today. Just as grant funding ramped back up, the pandemic brought it to a screeching halt. In March 2020, I was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, attending the Juno Awards where we had funded a Local 553 (Saskatoon, SK) initiative to create a musical welcome at the airport. Two days prior to the national awards, the Junos were canceled. The world was in turmoil and musicians’ livelihoods virtually stopped. Performances were sporadic as union offices juggled protecting the health of their members with seeking resources for them.

We scrambled with canceled events, but continued to pay the musicians, while we looked for alternative means to distribute our funds. Yes, and sometimes there really are silver linings in tragic events. We found our way through the legalities of copyright law and AFM policy, while we learned how to stream and handle multiple performances.

In May 2020, we tested three live streams with the involvement of Local 77 (Philadelphia, PA). By June, we were doing dozens of them! In the next 11 months, the MPTF and union locals organized over 750 online concerts through the MPTF’s Facebook page. If you want to work with resourceful people, find yourself some professional musicians!

We also introduced Music Family scholarships, which provided supplemental resources for union family members with college obligations. This was a return to the MPTF scholarships that had disappeared in the 1990s. Later, we initiated the Music’s Future scholarships, open to all music students. Combined, over 600 students have now received financial support with our educational grants.

We have reached a new normal over the past two years. Our revenues from Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment have collectively plateaued at around $6 million. We have built an unrestricted reserve of over $11 million to weather the next economic challenge that will inevitably come our way. Our overhead costs have also become consistent and predictable. The grants are flowing!

While MPTF enjoys a relatively calm path and predictable revenue for the foreseeable future, it is the ideal time to transition to new leadership with a vision for the challenges ahead. The long-term status of our three primary signatories needs to be considered. The impact of artificial intelligence and new technologies clearly presents still unknown challenges. Long-term relationships with other revenue sources should be examined and explored in harmony with the AFM.

It is with the MPTF’s history over the past decade and the optimism for the challenges ahead that I have chosen to end my chapter as trustee of the MPTF. It has been a fantastic experience for me, making new friends and new alliances. We weathered unpredictable events and felt a dynamic change in our trajectory thanks to the power of collective bargaining and the ability for management and labor to find positive solutions.

I am delighted and encouraged for the future with the appointment of Greg Linn as the new trustee of the recording industry’s Music Performance Trust Fund. He brings a steady hand, integrity, and a deep understanding and respect for creative people. I hope you will read about his extensive music industry experience and support his leadership in this next chapter of the little miracle that is the MPTF.

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