Video available of Gene Simmons speaking at the White House

KISS bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons was seen yesterday in the White House briefing room, where he took over the podium and responded to questions from reporters on a range of subjects, including KISS‘s Sunday (December 7) Kennedy Center Honors Award and Simmons’s Tuesday (December 9) appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the American Music Fairness Act, which seeks to guarantee that singers are compensated by radio stations when their music is played, as reported by blabbermouth.net.

I’ll be pointing my finger at both Republicans and Democrats or senators who are joining to hear me talk about the American Music Fairness Act that needs to be passed because your favorite artists — Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and quite a few others — were never paid a single cent when you heard their voices on the radio. Nothing. They were never paid for their performance on the radio, even though radio yearly was making almost 14 billion dollars.

In America, if you work hard, you should get paid,” he continued. “But that is a fact that’s been around for forever, and sadly this injustice has been ongoing without anybody paying attention to it. It doesn’t affect us as much ’cause we make a living. But our kids, [my son] Nick and [my daughter] Sophie, are both successful artists, and we, as guardians of their future, are not going to allow this injustice to continue.

If there’s an artist who’s heard on radio, they should get paid, because the radio stations use our name, our likeness to promote their radio stations on billboards, everywhere else, and they charge advertisers money and they’re making 14 billion — that’s with a ‘B’ — dollars annually, multiplied by, if you have a 50-year career, that’s a lot of money. Can the artists that we all admire — from Sinatra to Elvis — have a little bit of that? Would that be okay?

So this is a bipartisan bill that will get passed because the president is very pro artists.

America invented the music of the world in the first place. Rock and roll, blues, jazz, most of it from black music, of course, and country and western, hip-hop was invented right here, and we’re letting our artists, the voices of America, American culture, get by working hard on their craft and not getting paid.