music licensing closing down venues?

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so fucking retarded. and they wonder why the "record industry" is dying...
SCtimes wrote:Sounds of silence? Fees spur venues to scrap live music

When health problems kept Mike Thole from going on the road, the Sunday night workshops at Bo Diddley’s became his musical refuge.

Thole, who recently turned 60, suffered several complications from a childhood bout with polio, including arthritis in his back and leg and pain from a recent hip replacement. By this summer, the pain was so bad he could no longer tour with his band, Ring of Kerry.

But the local guitar player still had “The Acoustic Project,” the weekly get-together at Bo Diddley’s that he’d started years earlier. It was something to look forward to; a place for him to teach some of St. Cloud’s less-experienced musicians and help them forge their talents in the fires of live performance — even if the artists frequently outnumbered their listeners.

“We were doing something with a high degree of artistry,” Thole said. “We weren’t playing ‘Free Bird’ for some drunk in the back of a bar.”

So it cut Thole deeply when “The Acoustic Project” was taken away from him this summer, too. This time it had nothing to do with his health. Thole was told that Bo Diddley’s was indefinitely suspending its live music — a staple at the restaurant since 1982 — because a national music licensing company was demanding several years worth of licensing fees from the eatery’s owners.

Thole was shocked. He realized he might have covered a licensed songwriter’s work at some point during the weekly sessions, but it wasn’t as though he were trying to get rich off someone else’s work. Bo Diddley’s never charged any entrance fees and he wasn’t getting paid, aside from the occasional free sub sandwich.

“This one really sucked, because I couldn’t even play for a fricking sandwich,” Thole said. “I could have done the thing at Bo Diddley’s. That was something that, physically, I could still do and loved doing.”

Nothing new
Bo Diddley’s is not the first local venue to cut live music under pressure from licensing companies.

“Fully 50 percent of the clubs that we were gigging at five years ago have shut down their live music,” said Dan Preston of local band Preston and Paulzine.

Within the past three years, Bravo Burritos and Grizzly’s Wood-Fired Grill (formerly Bear Creek) in Waite Park ended all live performances after receiving letters and phone calls from licensing companies that their ownership said became progressively more aggressive. Brian Lee, co-owner of The White Horse, said his bar is “seriously considering” doing the same.

“The licensing companies think they’re God,” Bravo Burritos owner Bill Ellenbecker said. “They call you up and threaten you with lawsuits and demands of money.”

There are three major live music licensing companies in the U.S. — Broadcast Music Inc., the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and SESAC (formerly the Society of European Stage Actors and Composers). If a performer covers an ASCAP, BMI or SESAC song in a venue that has not purchased a license from that company, the venue owner could be subject to copyright infringement penalties.

For venues of 0-100 people, the fees are generally no more than $650 a year, but restaurant and bar owners may have to pay that to each of the three licensing companies, and that’s in addition to the “mechanical music” fees many already pay for jukebox or radio play. There also are extra fees for venues that have karaoke or a dance floor.

SESAC is by far the smallest of the three major licensing companies, but its repertory still includes big-name, often-covered artists such as Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond. ASCAP’s artist list includes Bon Jovi and Tom Petty. BMI, the largest of the three with more than 400,000 artists, licenses the Beatles.

All three have regional representatives who monitor local venues to find out where their company’s music is being played without a license. Then they contact the venue owner, let them know that they may be in violation of copyright law and encourage them to buy a live music license.

Barbara Grahn, an attorney who specializes in copyright and trademark law for the Minneapolis firm Oppenheimer, Wolff and Donnelly, said venue owners don’t have much legal recourse against the licensing companies. The licensing companies’ regional representatives generally come to court with the names of protected songs they heard played and the dates they heard them. Sometimes they make digital recordings.

In a civil court, where the burden of proof is a preponderance of the evidence, that’s usually enough. Restaurant and bar owners can’t offer evidence to refute the licensing reps because most don’t keep meticulous records of every song that is played at their venue in a given year.

Grahn said she’d never actually seen a case where the courts ruled in favor of a restaurant or bar and against the licensing company.

“They virtually always prevail,” Grahn said. “There’s no real defense to this. You need a license to publicly perform their music.”

Licensing view
Lee, the co-owner of The White Horse, said he was surprised when letters from SESAC started arriving.

“We don’t use cover bands,” Lee said. “The guys that come in and play for us aren’t like at a lot of the other bars. We want original material from our artists.”

How does SESAC know that its music has been played at The White Horse?

“Basically, we don’t know,” said Dave Ascher, the SESAC Music Licensing Consultant who sent the letters. “To make a long story short, there’s no way, logistically, for us to know whether on a day-to-day basis they’re playing SESAC music.”

Ascher said that since SESAC licenses thousands of popular songs, the company sometimes starts from the assumption that any venue with live music needs its license. He said the first few calls and letters to those venues were just to inform the owners about copyright law and let them know how much it would cost to buy a license that would protect them from copyright infringement.

Lee said he has received about five letters from SESAC in recent months. The most recent, dated Oct. 19, reads in part: “Copyright infringement is expensive, and Federal Law requires that permission be obtained prior to the public performance of copyrighted music. We urge you to consult an attorney regarding this important matter.”

Though not an explicit threat of legal action, Lee read it as such.

“Frankly, we’re afraid of getting sued,” Lee said.

Jerry Bailey, director of media relations at BMI, said his company didn’t always pursue legal action against smaller venues, because it isn’t always worth the money or the effort of sending a representative to the venue and gathering evidence. But sometimes it was necessary.

“We have a responsibility to the 400,000 songwriters and publishers affiliated with us to collect all the income they’re entitled to under the law,” Bailey said. “We take that very seriously.”

But Preston said the licensing companies were benefiting only a small number of well-known artists. Because there’s no practical way to track how many times an artist’s songs are covered live, the live music royalties that ASCAP, SESAC and BMI dole out are based mostly on radio and TV play.

“They’re protecting Bruce Springsteen, who doesn’t really need a whole lot more money,” Preston said.

Some licensed artists are concerned about the aggressiveness of the companies that represent them. Local musician Allen Simon, better known by his stage name MoeDeLL, is an ASCAP-licensed artist who said he has suffered from losing gigs at places like Grizzly’s and The White Horse. But he also said that he plans to get every song on his new album, “Kairos,” licensed, just in case one makes it big.

“I’m definitely a 50-50 split,” MoeDeLL said. “What sucks is that if you’re not big, like a Jack Johnson or a Tom Petty, you don’t normally see any (royalties).”

MoeDeLL said he hadn’t received any live music royalties for his licensed songs.

“I’m sorry to hear that, but what I would like to tell him is that he needs to write a hit song,” BMI’s Bailey said. “I don’t mean that sarcastically. The world of songwriting is a very competitive business and if other people don’t perform your music, you’re not going to make money.”

The future
Preston and Paulzine is a local music success story. About 10 years ago Preston, a guitar player, teamed up with Deanna Paulzine, a bass player and vocalist, in St. Cloud. They made their name by playing at church festivals, street dances and small restaurants and bars like Bo Diddley’s and The White Horse. Now they are booked all over Central Minnesota, sometimes playing several gigs a week.

Though they now have a large catalog of original music, Preston and Paulzine’s ability to cover familiar songs in genres ranging from rock to country to jazz is part of what helped make them a local staple. Preston said he wasn’t sure that would be possible in St. Cloud now.

“The only reason our band is surviving is because we’re doing a lot of private parties, corporate gigs and stuff like that,” Preston said. “But I know a lot of musicians who can’t do that. Everybody’s hurting big-time and it’s because of this.”

More local venues are likely to receive calls and letters from licensing companies in the future. The Internet has made it easy for companies based out of New York or Nashville to find out where live music is being played in St. Cloud. Bailey said that after BMI employees check the online music calendars of local venues, they then often check the Web sites of the listed bands to see what type of music they play, and if any BMI songs are likely to be on their set list.

Bailey said he thought his company’s fees were fair and reasonable and added that restaurants and bars benefit from the atmosphere that music provides whether they make money directly off it or not.

But the local venue owners feel backed into a corner. They are basically reduced to three options: pay the fees, make sure their artists are always performing only original or unlicensed music, or shut down live music altogether.

Meanwhile, local musicians are caught in the middle.

“It’s just a shame that some local musician that has the talent and wants to play, can’t,” Thole said. “It’s ridiculous.”

Re: music licensing closing down venues?

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ASCAP, BMI and SESAC have been around for years, this is nothing new. If you do things right and call them first, they'll work with you and many times you can get licenses for a location for around $100 a year. Trust me, in the music rights world, that's dirt cheap. It's only if you're stupid and try to ignore them that they start upping their fees. Furthermore, unlike sync or broadcast or other usage rights were the fees are going to the huge corporations like the record companies, publishing rights that these three non-profit organizations represent go directly to the publishers, which in most cases is the original song writer. So when you stiff ASCAP for their small fees, you're not screwing over some big nameless company, you're screwing over the person who wrote the song, who probably got screwed by the record company themselves and is this is the only compensation they're really getting. Think of it as the song writer's equivalent of touring. It's how they making a living.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: music licensing closing down venues?

4
"There also are extra fees for venues that have karaoke or a dance floor." :psyduck:

I wonder how many of the bands that are represented by those companies started out by playing songs at a bar's live music night, maybe a few covers thrown in there...

Really, charging at all for a couple of kids playing a cover of their favourite band at a live music night is dumb, no matter who the money is going to. I feel for the artists being screwed by big record companies, but having another company screwing over the even smaller guy on your behalf isn't the way to fix things and just makes you a giant hypocrite.

This is no-where near copyright infringement by the real and just definition of the term. Unfortunately, the courts rarely use the just definition of anything when it comes to copyright cases.