How ASCAP screws indie artists

[Pete C]

Interesting piece on the imbalance of performance royalties, or how ASCAP plays reverse Robin Hood:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120323/18055718229/how-ascap-takes-money-successful-indie-artists-gives-it-to-giant-rock-stars.shtml

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

This is what ASCAP does. Back in the thirties, distribution of radio industry payments to ASCAP to composers was determined by a concept called 'availability', which basically meant that, if your name was Porter, Gershwin, Carmichael, Rodgers and a few dozen others, you got a huge payout every year, because more of your songs were 'available' than for writers of a few songs, which may have been big hits.

This was eventually settled when BMI started and attracted lots of ASCAP songwriters by proising to pay in relation to radio plays of their material. But ASCAP is a society and the biggest members who determine policy are the richest. And so...

MG

[medjuck]

The Canadian performing rights organization (whatever it's called) does it the English way. Or at least they did years ago when a folk singing friend of mine listed the same non-existent song after every concert to see what the performance fee for a song was. It wasn't substantial but it did exist. And he wasn't stealing from anyone else-- he wrote virtually everything he performed so he was getting all of the small amount of money anyway.

[Rooster_Ties]

I can't remember if it was ASCAP or BMI, but 20-ish years ago I worked about half-time, on-air at a top-40 FM station in my college town (in the middle of nowhere, IL). Once or twice a year, for a full week, we had to log every single piece of music played on-air (everything, including music beds, everything).

(With the permission of the MD, since he was signing off on all the logs), I religiously played Sun Ra under all my weather forcasts (often tunes off the "Other Voices, Other Blues" Horo double-LP I had) -- simply to log some Sun Ra, in the vague hopes I could push a couple dollars his way (and more so, just to make the ASCAP or BMI people have to look up some Sun Ra).

True story.