The Relentless Advocate - The Story of Bart Herbison
How persistence—not power—reshaped the economics of songwriting.
May 12, 2026
Bart Herbison didn’t grow up in the music business. He grew up around it, which is different. Cottage Grove, Tennessee—outside of Paris—wasn’t exactly a pipeline to Nashville, much less Washington. His father painted houses. His family worked with their hands. Music showed up the way it does for a lot of people in places like that: not as a career path, but as a spark.
He can trace it back to a moment. Four or five years old. His uncle calls him over, drops a needle on a record, and plays Elvis Presley. That was it. “Something happened to me,” he says. “You can have a moment in your life that changes it.” From there, music wasn’t a decision. It was just part of the system he was running.
The early years weren’t glamorous. Three brothers sharing trumpets in a house that couldn’t really afford them. Long days working for his father. Sandblasting. Carrying weight up ladders that didn’t care how much you weighed. At some point, he looked around and decided there had to be another lane. A friend had a job at a local radio station. That was enough logic for him: if that guy could do it, so could he.
Radio turned out to be the first real pivot. Not because he was good—he wasn’t. “I was terrible,” he says. “My voice sounded like Mickey Mouse.” What he did have was a willingness to take the shifts nobody else wanted. Late nights. Sunday mornings. The empty hours. He stacked reps. He studied the job. He outworked the gap between where he was and where he needed to be. “I have no talent really except I’m the most persistent human being you will ever meet.”
That line becomes a throughline.
By the late 1970s, he was news director at the station. He picked up additional work as a correspondent, covering West Tennessee politics. It wasn’t part of some grand plan. It was just where the opportunity was. But it put him close enough to power that he could see how decisions actually got made—and more importantly, who made them.
The break came sideways, the way they usually do. A local politician—Ned Ray McWherter—was running for governor and hated a campaign commercial. Herbison rewrote it. A friend set it to music. They stayed up all night to finish it. A few days later, McWherter heard it, liked it, and made an offer on the spot. When he was sworn in as governor, Herbison was in Nashville working for him.
At twenty-eight.
He landed as Deputy Director of Communications, effectively the press lead for the governor’s office. It was a big job, and he knew it. He also knew he didn’t belong there—yet. The staff had been with McWherter for years. He was the outsider. The one nobody knew. The one who had to prove it every day.
But proximity changes things. He traveled with the governor. Sat in the rooms. Watched how influence actually worked. And more importantly, how it didn’t.
McWherter gave him a framework that would define the next three decades. Don’t introduce something unless it can pass. Build support one person at a time. Understand the system before you try to move it. Herbison absorbed it all. “The best skill I acquired was an understanding of the legislative process and how to get things accomplished.”
It wasn’t theoretical. He saw it play out in real time. Budgets passed unanimously not because everyone agreed, but because incentives were structured in a way that made agreement the only logical outcome. Environmental battles won not through rhetoric, but through evidence placed directly in front of the people who couldn’t ignore it. Politics, at that level, wasn’t about noise. It was about leverage.
At the same time, he never lost the thread on music. Even in the governor’s office, he kept raising his hand for anything adjacent to it. Events. Programs. Introductions. It wasn’t part of his job description. It was just where his interest lived.
Two years in, another door opened. Congressman Bob Clement needed help with a press event. Herbison stepped in. A few days later, he had a job offer. He accepted on one condition: he wanted the music issues.
That decision set the course.
Washington was a different world. More expensive. More complex. More political in every sense. But it also gave him something he hadn’t had before: a front-row seat to how the music business actually intersected with policy. His first meeting on his first day was with the Nashville Songwriters Association International. He didn’t even fully understand what they did. But something about it clicked.
“I said a prayer that day,” he recalls.
“Let that be my next job. Let it be my last job.”
It took ten years.
During that decade, he went deep on songwriter issues. Not the surface-level stuff—the real mechanics. Copyright law. Royalty structures. The legacy of decisions made decades earlier that were still shaping outcomes in the present. He started to see the imbalance clearly. Record labels operated in a free market. Songwriters didn’t. Their rates were set by the government, based on rules that dated back to 1909.
The system wasn’t just outdated. It was tilted.
By the time he took over NSAI, the organization itself was on the brink. Bankrupt. Out of money. Out of leverage. His first move wasn’t strategic. It was survival. Borrow money to make payroll. Cut anything that wasn’t essential. Reset the tone.
Then he went looking for a win.
Not a symbolic one. A real one. Something that would materially change outcomes for songwriters and prove the organization could deliver. He found it in an obscure corner of tax law: capital gains treatment for songwriters.
It had been stripped away in 1951 for reasons that had nothing to do with music. The impact was significant. Songwriters selling their catalogs were getting hit twice—once as income, again as a sale. It was, in his words, “double taxation.”
The fix sounded simple. It wasn’t. It took seven and a half years.
He built the case. Found the language. Reduced it to something lawmakers could actually carry: one sentence that mattered. Then he worked the system the way he’d been taught—one person at a time. No shortcuts. No theatrics. Just persistence.
In 2006, the Songwriters Capital Gains Tax Equity Act passed.
It changed the economics of songwriting overnight. A catalog sale that might have netted significantly less now returned materially more to the creator. On a $5 million sale, the difference could be around $1 million. For the first time, the organization had proven it could move policy at a high level.
It also changed how the industry saw them.
“We were at the table every time groups got together,” he says. “Eventually, I would say we were one of the leaders at that table.”
From there, the work expanded. The Music Modernization Act. The creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective. New structures for how royalties were tracked, paid, and audited. None of it was simple. All of it required alignment across parties that didn’t naturally align—publishers, labels, tech companies, lawmakers.
That became part of the job. Not just fighting, but finding overlap. Building coalitions where none existed. Accepting that progress was rarely clean or immediate.
And always, staying relentless.
“You have to be relentless,” he says. “Seven years to get something done and the next day there’s something else.”
Now the fight has shifted again.
Artificial intelligence has introduced a new layer of complexity—one that doesn’t just challenge compensation, but authorship itself. Models trained on existing music. Songs generated at scale. Questions around ownership, permission, and value that don’t have clear precedents.
Herbison’s approach is consistent with everything that came before. Define the problem clearly. Simplify it into something actionable. Then push it through the system.
Permission. Payment. Proof. Penalty.
Four words. Four levers. A framework that can be explained in minutes inside a congressional office—and remembered.
“We’re right,” he says.
“And that’s all that’s carried me throughout 30 years of this career.”
He doesn’t pretend it’s easy. Or guaranteed. The outcome of the AI fight, particularly around fair use, will shape the next era of the business in ways that are hard to fully predict. Lose that battle, and decades of progress could unwind. Win it, and the balance shifts back toward creators.
Either way, he keeps working the same way he always has. Early mornings. Late nights. One meeting at a time. One decision at a time.
Because underneath all of it—the policy, the politics, the economics—he still comes back to the same thing that got him into this in the first place.
The music.
He’ll tell you outright that most of the job isn’t enjoyable. “I hate 85 or 90% of my job,” he says. But the part that matters—the songs, the writers, the moments when it connects—that’s enough.
It has to be.
Looking back, if there’s one thing he’d change, it’s not professional. It’s personal. The balance wasn’t there. The drive that pushed him forward also came with a cost. “It was always professionally driven,” he says. “And there’s a cost to that.”
He doesn’t romanticize it. He just acknowledges it.
The throughline, though, never really changes. From a kid hearing Elvis on a scratchy record to one of the most influential advocates for songwriters in the country, the pattern holds.
No shortcuts. No sudden jumps.
Just persistence.
