Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general) copyright and licensing in the US?
The DMCA is over 2 decades old, and seemingly nothing useful has come up since. The current system seems to do not much other than provide a big stick for the RIAA and MPAA to wield whenever they get bored and try to extract rent using law that still seems stuck in some mire of player piano era logic. The last sane system I encountered was when I was doing college radio, where you had a license to play music, were required to log what music you played, and were assured that some clearinghouse would sort out the royalties that needed paying out of the aggregate license fees.
There seems to be mass confusion over what's legal on modern services like Twitch, where music is used in the same spirit as radio (background music chosen at the whim of the DJ/streamer), but isn't legal because it runs up against licensing schemes designed for including music in TV and film productions with massive budgets.
There doesn't seem to be any clear way to handle shit as any sort of small content creator, as the rightsholders seem to want to preserve some weird fantasy land where they're both entitled to complex negotiated rights deals (which make sense if you're say, some massive entity a la NBC, and want to include music in a new big budget show) while also not providing anything for the rest of society (if you're not NBC- or CBS-sized, the people who negotiate rights contracts won't give you the time of day). If you're not one of the mammoth-class media conglomerates, your options appear to be "do not use music ever" or "use music casually, and then be on the receiving end of a massive legal bludgeon". You can't get the time (or music) of day, but if you do somehow manage to get it, then you _do_ get the time of day, but in the form of massive retroactive fees or whatever that you "should" have paid had the licensing cthulu been willing to engage with you before you determined that the rightsholders weren't interested in dealing with you.
Right ol' kafkaesque nightmare, it is.