[BC] ASCAP and BMI and Rights

[Rich Wood]

------ At 08:36 AM 2/1/2006, WFIFeng at aol.com wrote: -------

>There are many situations where suing people for $4000 is, essentially,
>equivalent to suing them out of house-and-home. Add to that $4K the 
>legal & Court
>fees, time lost from work, etc. and you start to run into ruinous 
>sums for most
>lower-middle & middle class folk.

How many people think stealing music is OK? I've run across many. I 
tell them it's theft of intellectual property. They laugh. They're 
willing to take the risk. People who steal music, for the most part, 
are well aware it's illegal and most kids stealing it from the net 
know that the RIAA will go after them. They still do it. They took 
the gamble and they lost. How come you can understand religious 
retribution but theft of other people's work is OK and should carry 
no punishment?

>As to the telephone "music on hold" situation, that is still sheer nonsense.

Why? You can buy fully licensed music and all sorts of companies 
provide material for use on hold. I'm not sure, but I think a radio 
station's license allows its programming on hold. A commercial 
business has no right to the use of my programming that uses licensed 
music. My approach is "if you don't own it (or lease it), don't use 
it." Very simple.

>How much of those fees do the composers actually get? Yes, our station pays
>significant sums for the very little bit of music we play. (One hour daily,
>only March-Aug.) I've talked to a handful of artists whose music we played
>regularly, and they usually saw very small "tips" once a year.

Two things: you sound like you have a blanket license. A station that 
does mostly Talk should have a per play license. If you use canned 
religion and don't have a log of the music they've used, you're sunk.

I've also talked to many artists. It's mostly composers and musicians 
who have a hard time getting paid.That still doesn't excuse the theft 
of the material.

In the past, logging songs was a pain. With today's digital systems 
that output an ASCII text file for RDS, Streaming, traffic and IBUZ 
you could report every song you played to ensure the performers got 
paid. In taped music syndication that's, essentially what we did. 
We'd send the licensing companies copies of our music lists for each 
tape. Then we sent a copy of the tape schedule and an affiliate list. 
Our affiliates no longer had to do manual logging. Nothing we do is 
secret, so your playlist doesn't have to be protected from the 
licensing organizations. They don't pass your stuff on to anyone else.

Andy Economos of RCS grabbed me at a convention some years ago to 
show me a logger they were working on. Song hooks were in a database 
and a radio fed the computer. What you played was compared with the 
database and the machine spit out every song you played. It's a very 
simple way to capture your competition's playlist without ever 
listening to them.

One of the guys I worked with at XTRA developed a magazine that 
published station playlists. It's now owned by Premiere Radio 
Networks - owned by Clear Channel. Its name escapes me right now.

Rich

Rich Wood
Rich Wood Multimedia
Phone: 413-303-9084
FAX: 413-480-0010