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Music Industry Shaking Down Coffee Shops
realjd writes with news out of Florida that music licensing companies are now hitting small bars and coffee shops that offer live music, even if only occasionally and even if the musicians don't get paid. One coffee-shop owner told musicians they can only perform their own songs from now on. "A restaurant owner who doesn't even offer live music was approached for payment for having the TV on while the Monday Night Football theme played. And if the owners pay up to one licensing company, all of the others start harassing them, calling four times a day, demanding payment too. It sounds like they don't even check whether any copyright violations occurred, they're just sending bills to any business that may or may not have live music."
<sarcasm>
I must say that it's about time they cracked down on these coffeehouses! I received no payment for playing but I watched customers repeatedly purchase drinks sometimes resulting in $1, $2 or even $3 transactions! Clearly this was only because the combo I was in was playing well known standards.
In the end, I apologize to Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves and all the other bands we blatantly abused to slightly increase the sales at a small fledgling establishment. I know that these artists are undoubtedly ruined by the actions of me and my fellow band mates while we were in college. In the wrongest sense, we evaded the long arm of the law and all deserve felonies if we don't face life sentences.
However, this story has a happy ending, as one of the establishments we had the most shows at (The Purple Onion) is no more now that Starbucks has moved in across the street. Corporate America wins again in this story and we no longer have to suffer from the grave injustices committed near 15th and University Ave in Dinkytown. Hopefully all of these small time operations are shut down one after the other so I don't have to see walls beautifully covered with art featuring a different student artist every week. Instead, I can rest easy in my non-world-disrupting CEO approved mainstream environments
</sarcasm>
It's too bad that this cycle will take far too long for the public to realize what they'll be losing by allowing this to occur. It's also very sad that I'm probably a minority of people who live in remorse about this sort of thing--and for that reason it will probably continue to happen. When I saw this headline, it was equivalent to "Music Licensing Companies List 'Eating Kittens' as Favorite Pastime, 'Destroying Dreams' a Close Second."
If you can point me to proof that there's any artist out there that really wants things to be this way, I'd be shocked. This is a classic case of an idea and organization formed with good intentions that has slowly become an uncontrollable machine. The worst part is that if a coffeehouse is sued, I doubt the original artist can intervene as they've probably already signed contracts punishable by death. We would have to wait for a whole new generation of musicians to arise to avoid these mistakes though I doubt they could make it without the affiliation of the large governing organizations.
Hold your local artists that are on indie labels or making it by themselves on a higher level, America. Soon, they will face extinction and your relationship to them will be governed through a man in a suit.
I'll end this post with an excerpt from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Working for MCA: Slickers steal my money since I was seventeen,
if it ain't no pencil pusher then it got to be a honky tonk queen.
But I signed my contract, baby, and I want you people to know
that every penny I make, I gotta see where my money goes.
Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
workin' for MCA. My advice if you want to 'just happen' to hear some good live music would be to first leave the country.
My work here is dung.
Damn, now I'm afraid to even hum a tune in Starbucks!
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Before you guys get all worked up, remember that it's NOT the RIAA behind this. It's the LICENSING companies.
Honestly, this is getting crazy. It reminds me of Stallman's short story/essay, "Right to Read" where you have to have a license to read a book you borrowed from the library or from a friend.
Music has always been something that was freely exchanged throughout human history. Songs belonged in the public domain, even if no one thought of it and framed it in those terms. There were just songs that people had always sang or played, and had no apparent author.
Now we are entering a period where the RIAA seems to think they should get a dollar from you if you whistle a tune when you walk down the sidewalk. Has the hookers and cocaine money train really slowed down that much for them? They must be a bunch of paranoid, power-mad f*cks with an extreme sense of entitlement.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Moving beyond the point that this has to be the most purely dick move I have ever heard of, isn't a live performance of a song written by someone else a cover? Isn't a cover a derivative work protected by law? I mean, Weird Al does derivative performances that copy nearly exactly the music of some artists (he usually alters only the lyrics) and every time he does a M. Jackson song he gets sued by MJ, and he always wins. What's the difference here?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
This is really getting out of hand. Pretty soon you're going to have to pay royalties if you have the radio on with passengers in your car, which isn't that far a stretch from paying royalties for songs played on a TV in a bar. It's not going to be much longer before either someone sane intervenes or the recording industry collapses under the weight of thousands of lawsuits against its primary customers.
We can hope for the latter.
At first I was just going to blow this off as yet another bar that was trying to get away with not paying it's ASCAP fees, then I read the part where one owner had already payed ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and were still getting billed by other piss-ant licensing companies trying to extort money out of him. Are these people for real or are they just scammers? I thought the entire purpose of having a statutory license for live performance was to avoid crap like this.
My coffee shop was shaken down by ASCAP a couple years back, and they were very clear about the fact that even if it was original music, they still wanted to be paid. In fact, when I pointed out we did not have a stage and did not have live music, They said in no uncertain terms that since we could not absolutely prove to them that no music was ever performed there, we had to pay anyway or face litigation, prosecution (yea, right), and an injunction shutting us down. That and what they wanted was not just a grand or two, I don't remember, but it was excessive. We told them to piss off and gave them our attorneys number, and we never heard from them again. Other shops in the area did pay out, though, and one CLOSED because of the legal harassment. What a racket.
This has been how it's worked for decades. ASCAP/BMI are assigned the public performance rights to songs, and they can be very thorough about collecting from everybody owes them. In the past, they've even harrassed companies where the employees played music in areas that could be heard by the public. Own a small retail store and play CD's in the background? Then you owe them a licensing fee.
While ASCAP/BMI can be very heavy-handed, I have to say that it's hardly the worst aspect of IP law. The good part of the arrangement is that a band can perform whatever cover songs they want, and licensing is the club owner's responsibility. And, y'know, if you write a song and somebody else performs it, you ought to get paid.
The bad part is that the convenience of uniting all the performance rights under a single umbrella creates an overly powerful organization.
Funny how people think that fascism is related to loud patriotic parades, exposition of insignia and group thinking, oppression of freedom and... well you get the idea, when it can just metastasize from within the society, perfectly legal (if it is not, new "sponsored" legislation will make it so) creeping up not on freedom itself but on its "pricelessness".
Do you want to be free? There is a price for it (brought to you by $favorite_company). Did you just glance while walking down the street at the store window TV playing Super Bowl? You owe $favorite_company money my friend! Our new eye movement, eye direction-focus detectors never lie. Your eyes were focused on the TV screen for 0.134s, thus you owe us royalties buddy...
Oh, I know how all this will end alright...and it won't be pretty...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
Can't you see what's happening? Its been happening for over a decade now.
The music industry is slamming the small music scenes trying to make more people buy CDs because they can't find any local shows. Either that or pay $300 for a ticket to a concert that they're running 300 miles away. They're trying to kill the competition.
And yeah, they pretty much just go through the phone book and pick coffee houses to harass. I would say that if you're a coffee house that has paid and you haven't broken any obvious laws, that you should be entitled to that money back PLUS administrative fees.
What if I walked in, said you were violating a law that you were not, and demanded payment. What's that called again?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't sports broadcasts (Footbal et al.) have a very large portion of their time taken up by commercials? Isn't it beneficial for the broadcasters to have their commercials put in front of hundreds of consumers? It's not like bars/restaurants mute the TV or change the channel or use PVR "commercial skip" measures during commercial breaks. The volume is also typically quite loud so the broadcast can be heard over the normal bar banter so what's the problem?
Further to this, commercials broadcast during a football game are generally geared towards the very demographic of those patrons in the bar. 20-50 year old males with a propensity towards alcohol, women, social activities, cars/trucks, etc. so the commercials are being broadcast directly into a testosterone filled den of the core target audience. Moreover, you know if these men are at a bar they have the disposable income with which to purchase the promoted products so they're more likely to have a positive input for the advertisers and therefore the network(s) broadcasting the event.
Am I missing something here?
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Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Pay up suckers.
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Performance rights organizations been doing this for years. At least, ASCAP has been.
They've shut down mom-and-pop bars that rent juke boxes from vendors but didn't pay a the fee to have music in their public place. You'd think that buying the CD would be enough to cover the royalty, but no. You'd think that because almost all the money goes to vendor who owns the machine that it would be the vendor's problem, but no. Go over to ASCAP site and read through the press release archive ... every year they sue the business out of a dozen or so places that they decide to make examples of. It's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the business not paying the license, but if you put one business out of business, every remaining business in that market will pony up if it can.
But every year the fees go up and up and up. And now it's way way way more expensive to pay the fee than to risk it.
I ran a newspaper that wrote a story (reported by Michael Carmody) about this last year. Here's a solid quote from the story that supports what I'm saying:
I agree with lots of the posts from Americans I have seen here in slashdot before that state that if USA is *this* terrible why are people still willing to live there? I really can not understand it, what is it there in the USA that people, even some Britons (I live in Britain today) want to live there??
I don't know. Ask the Mexicans.
First of all: IAAL, but this ain't legal advice.
1. This is nothing new. Public performances have had to be licensed since right around 1900, and ASCAP has been collecting fees for blanket licenses since 1914. This is not a new campaign designed to squelch independent musicians, as some comments have intimated.
2. This isn't controversial or surprising. It's not an issue of free speech or fair use, at least as far as public performances in profit-making business establishments are concerned. The EFF and the ACLU, I suspect, wouldn't be interested -- and neither would some random Congressman be shocked to have to pay ASCAP/BMI/SESAC fees, as one comment suggested. Maybe it would be good to allow unlicensed performances of music in business establishments, but that hasn't been the law for a very long time.
3. My sense is that around a dozen businesses decide to "fight" blanket license fees each year, thinking that somehow they won't end up having to pay or that the licenses aren't needed in order to play copyrighted songs in their establishments. They always lose.
4. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC have occasionally been accused of "shaking down" businesses that really don't play any music for which they need a license -- like, say, bars that only play traditional Irish songs that are in the public domain. If those stories are true, the shakedowns are bad, wrong, and potentially liability-producing. (See also 17 USC 110.)
If you still want to be mad at somebody (and there may be good reason to be mad about some of this, just not most of it), at least be mad at the right people: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, who work as the agents of owners of copyright in musical works (not sound recordings). The RIAA is a group of copyright owners in sound recordings, and has nothing to do with this (except that some of the music publishers and some of the record labels are commonly owned).
This last Christmas I joined my family for service and noticed a copyright notice at the bottom of the page, for one of the songs.
Turns out they pay a yearly fee for the right to sing hymnals.
You got to love it
0100001001100101011010010110111001100111 0100100001110101011011010110000101101110
work is work! I get a check for physical work. If I want another check, I have to do it again, or do something different, then I get another check. I can't tell my boss "ooohh, that work I did last month was performance art! Ya, that's the ticket, performance art! You owe me royalties now every time you even think about it! And if you *dare* have someone else do the same exact work, I'll sue for copyright infringement!!1one" "
Nope, sorry, "artists" want money, they can go to work same as everyone else. They want to make more on the side, sell schwag and CDs right at the venue. Get famous enough, sell freakin autographs.
I don't know. Ask the Mexicans.
Two points:
1. Many of the people you refer to as Mexicans are actually from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, etc. Washington policy has always wanted latino labor to be a cheap, exploitable commodity. US corporations have always seen Latin America as their rightful property, toxic dump and political/military playground. The influx of latin immigrants (whether they come from Central or South America, northern Mexico is the portal to the USA) is just another example of selfish and shortsighted Washington policy coming back home to roost.
2. It's a two way street. Do you have any idea just how many gringos live in Mexico? Quite a lot. In fact, many more than you might imagine. Just check out most of Baja, San Miguel De Allende, Cuernavaca, Merida, etc. And it's not just Mexico, of course, gringos are everywhere.
From the OP: What is it there in the USA that people, even some Britons (I live in Britain today) want to live there??
While it's true that some people from all over the world may want to live in the USA, let's not ignore the fact that a large number of USA citizens have had it up to here and bailed ship already.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I used to be in the DJ biz in the 80's and I know several still in it today. Absolutely NONE pay BMI or ASCAP fees of any kind. Most have resorted to simply changing their business name yearly to hide.
From what I have seen I would bat that nationwide that 90% of party, bar and school DJ services are not paying the fees.
just work under a LLC and rent all your gear. If they catch you they wont get crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Years age the state of N.H. had some state sponsored liquor stores on
the interstate. Residents of Mass. would cross the border to buy liquor
cheap in N.H. (bootlegging ?). Well Mass. get pissed off at loosing
state sales taxes on booze so they had the Mass. state troopers stationed
in unmarked cars in front of the N.H. liquor stores to radio license tag
numbers back to troopers on the Mass. side of the border. The Mass. cops
would then arrest those who crossed the border with the booze.
The N.H. state police got even. They arrested the Mass. troopers for loitering.