Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

STATEMENT FOR THE RECORD FOR THE HEARING OF FEBRUARY 23,24, 1995 ON MUSIC LICENSING, BMI, ASCAP

Hon. Rep. William J. Hughes

Chair, House Subcom. on Intellectual Prop. & Judicial Admin.

207 Cannon HOB

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Hughes;

I am writing to call your attention to the current hearings concerning BMI and ASCAP licensing practices. I am a writer and performer of non-mainstream music and a member of BMI. As matters now stand, BMI practices for collecting and distributing licensing fees has an adverse effect on my ability to earn a living for the following reasons:

(1) The practice of charging fees to small venues and the fines levied for failure to comply have closed several clubs in my area.

(2) When I play my own compositions (which are BMI registered) in a club which pays their performance fees, my potential earnings are reduced due to these fees. Since performance fees are paid to composers based solely on radio airplay, and since the methods for tracking radio airplay is biased in favor of mainstream musicians, this constitutes a substantial decrease in my earning power.

(3) BMI enforcement personel have made it difficult for me to have my recorded music played in restaurants and clubs which offer it for sale.

In addition to these very personal concerns, I have other concerns based on a sense of fairness, as follows:

(1) Since radio stations pay a broadcast fee, levying additional fees on receivers constitutes a form of double-dipping.

(2) Tracking procedures are woefully archaic and unfair to the many thousands of composers who are not involved in pop, country or rock genres.

(3) Not allowing independent reporting of broadcast music is frustrating and unfair to those of us lucky enough to receive high visibility airplay, such as network television, and yet recieve no credit.

(4) The practice of charging a license fee to participants in festivals when they have already paid fees in their home venue is another form of double-dipping.

For these reasons I am asking you to support a full scale congressional investigation of all music licensing organizations.

Sincerely,

Frederick D. Gosbee
Round Pond, ME

[blocks in formation]

As a non-profit organization that is required to buy licenses from ASCAP, we wish to have our objection to this forced participation registered and considered by your committee.

We have a Bluegrass music 'jam' once a month at the local High School which is just 'open mike' for local non professional people to perform. Nobody is paid anything for performing, but because we do not know if someone might sing 'covered' material we are obliged to pay $80.00 per year for a license from ASCAP.

We also have a three day Bluegrass Festival each year and we are required to pay $50.00 per day for a license from ASCAP in case some 'covered' material might be used.

While we have no objection to song writers being paid for their talents, we do object to having no way of knowing when or if these monies are properly paid. Any song writers we have asked about this advise they receive nothing for their material from ASCAP. If this practise is to be continued, which we most certainly object to, we want to have some kind of statement each year showing which artists have been paid and how much.

We appreciate the opportunity to have our concerns addressed by your committee.

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Squire's Own Music

Hon. Representative William J. Hughes

Chairman, House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property & Judicial Administration 207 Cannon House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

STATEMENT FOR THE RECORD for the hearing of February 23, 24, 1995 on

MUSIC LICENSING, BMI, ASCAP

Dear Mr. Hughes:

12JUN94

I ask that you support and request or conduct a full scale Congressional investigation of all Music
Licensing organizations like ASCAP and BMI.

I am sure that you are receiving hundreds of letters like this, and therefore many examples of unfairness. It is unlikely that any specific case I mention would increase your awareness by its uniqueness, so I will provide only one; but identical circumstances have arisen with every person that I have discussed this with. My diary indicates that I have had discussions with 12 performers that I represent, two arts agencies (non-profits) and two music festivals. I believe cases like this must be the nearly universal experience of everyone involved in independent music performance, production and distribution. indicating problems of such proportion as to warrant and merit the attention I am asking you to pay through a comprehensive Congressional investigation.

Incidentally, my company is a BMI member music publisher, most of the performers I represent are BMI member composers, ALL of the performers that I represent regularly perform BMI and ASCAP licensed material in BMI and ASCAP licensed venues, and receive national radio airplay for their own copyrighted and licensed works, and the similarly copyrighted and licensed works of similar emerging artists. Not one of us has ever received a cent in royalties!

I coordinated booking of The Cutters and the Suffering Gaels into the Shoreline Arts Commission (a not for profit public arts agency) St. Patrick's Day concert. Everyone involved knew ahead of time that only material in the public domain, or else owned by the performers, would be presented. ASCAP 'obtained' ("extorted" comes to mind as perhaps more apt) a fee from Shoreline Arts by 'informing them' ("threatening" seems not too harsh) that failure to pay would result in legal action to prevent the performance from taking place. None of the composers or music publishers of any of the works performed that night got any portion of the fee collected, and ASCAP wasn't lawfully entitled to collect the fee in this case in the first instance: even if they had been, their methods were illegal.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][subsumed][merged small]

FOLKALLIANCE

NORTH AMERICAN

FOLK MUSIC AND DANCE ALLIANCE

Honorable Representative William J. Hughes

June 14, 1994

Chairman. House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property & Judicial Administration 207 Cannon House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Statement for the Record for the Hearing of February 23-24, 1994 on Music Licensing

Dear Mr. Hughes:

The North American Folk Music & Dance Alliance, the Folk Alliance, is a non-profit organization under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. The North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance exists to foster and promote traditional, contemporary and multicultural folk music, dance and related performing arts in North America. The Folk Alliance seeks to strengthen and advance organizational and individual initiatives in folk music and dance through education, networking, advocacy, and professional and field development.

As such. our membership includes several hundreds of song composers and publishers and many dozens of presenters of folk music concerts for the enjoyment and edification of the general public. The activities of both these groups are essential to fulfillment of our educational mission. We need for composers and publishers to be able to make a living, and we need for there to be thousands of venues ranging from small, non-profit coffeehouses to gigantic festivals at which folk music can be performed for the public. The performing rights agencies, particularly ASCAP and BMI, form an important component of this process. At this point the performing rights agencies do not serve our community nearly as well as we would like. For the reasons outlined below, folk composers and publishers are grossly underrepresented in payouts from these agencies, while many small venues that present folk music have closed their doors rather than pay licensing fees. These situations can be corrected and in such a manner that will benefit not only of the folk community but ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC as well.

That said, The Folk Alliance clearly recognizes that the performing rights agencies perform a vital service to the music industry. The music publishing business could not operate without their efforts. I should point out that The Folk Alliance enjoys cordial professiona! relationships with ASCAP and BMI. ASCAP, in fact, has always been a generous major sponsor of The Folk Alliance Annual Conference. We have, in turn, afforded ASCAP the opportunity to answer concerns and questions and recruit members at our events. We have always paid the requisite fees for our events to both ASCAP and BMI, and would be happy to pay SESAC should any of their catalog ever be performed at our conference. We have no desire to throw the baby out with the bath

water.

The most significant problem in this area derives from the methodology used in determining the payments from ASCAP and BMI to publishers and composers. Unlike the performing rights agencies in other nations, ASCAP and BMI depend almost entirely on television and a sampling of radio to create a model of what is performed live. The very existence of ASCAP's special awards program constitutes an admission that the system does not work. The first drawback is that this assumption simply is counterfactual. One need look no farther than the Grateful Dead, year in and year out the most successful touring band in USA, for an example of an act that tours to massive crowds without receiving significant Top 40 airplay. The "Concert Pulse" section listing the top 50 concert acts of the past three months, in the June 6 issue of Pollstar includes numerous mainstream commercial acts (Rod Stewart, Moody Blues, Barry Manilow, Jethro Tull, Bob Dylan, the Ramones, and Richard Thompson) whose current live drawing power is not reflected in current airplay.

[ocr errors]

PO Box 5010 Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Phone 919-962-3397 Fax 919-962-4453

FOLKALLIANCE

NORTH AMERICAN

FOLK MUSIC AND DANCE ALLIANCE

The folk music world, moreover, consists of dozens upon dozens of touring artists who virtually live on the road playing for audiences of 25 to 500 in venues ranging from living rooms and church basements to stately medium sized theaters. Reports of the vast majority of the these concerts never appear in commercially oriented publications such as Pollstar, so the following data for folk artists from its June 6 number for the mere tip of the folk iceberg:

[blocks in formation]

Further bear in mind that during warm weather, much folk music activity occurs at outdoor folk festivals. Some, such as the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the Merle Watson Memorial Festival, draw upwards of 25,000 people. More than 500 other festivals in the USA draw anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand people each annually. All this is to suggest that folk artists are drawing people to venues and events that contribute significant amounts to ASCAP and BMI, yet the composers and publishers of the material they perform are not receiving concomitant payments from the agencies.

As expressed above, the very nature of radio sampling, rather than live performance sampling, leads to this result. The sampling methods further skew the results since they focus on commercial, weekday, daytime airplay. The vast majority of airplay for folk performers, both traditional and contemporary, occurs at nights and on weekends on several hundred public and community radio stations, as well as a few, often smaller,

[ocr errors]

PO Box 5010 Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Phone 919-962-3397 Fax 919-962-4453

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »