Licensing executive with performing rights organization Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) shows how she “convinces” owners of nightclubs, restaurants, and any other venue where copyrighted music is either played or performed.
No organization is arguably as ruthless as are performing rights groups like Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) as was again made clear recently in an article in the NYTimes.
The author follows around a licensing executive named Devon Baker and shows to what length BMI goes to to ensure each and every venue where copyrighted music is either played or performed pays the requisite licensing fee.
For eating and drinking establishments here is what they are asked to pay:
- Live Music: multiple singers and instrumentalists (5-7 nights p/wk) = $5.45
- Enhanced Record Music: Karaoke, DVD, Video Tapes, VJs (5-7 nights p/wk) = $3.15
- Recorded Music: iPod/MP3/CDs/Tapes, etc. = $2.65
- Cover Charge = $1.70
- Dancing to Recorded Music = $1.70
- TV or Radio: $1.70
All the fees are per occupant and based on the maximum occupancy of the venue regardless of whether it actually ever gets filled on a given night. The maximum amount the BMI is permitted to charge is $9,000 per location per year.
BMI used to have some 14 branches around the country in order to enforce licensing fees, but has since downsized and made use of the Internet and telephone to “educate” businesses around the country that they must pay to play copyrighted music. The Internet has made BMI’s job easier than ever because venues oftentimes advertise online.
Baker says the job is oftentimes a tough one with many owners threatening her life or telling her to “eat shit and die.”
“Then there was the female punk-rock-club owner in Colorado who ripped up Baker’s licensing agreement, ordered her out of the club, followed her out the door, spit a huge goober on the paperwork and stuck it to Baker’s windshield,” reads the article (this is my personal favorite).
Richard Conlon, BMI’s Senior VP for Corporate Strategy, Communications & New Media, emphasizes that the licensing fees are not intended to inhibit the use of copyrighted music, and that it’s only trying to make sure people pay what artists are rightfully owed.
“We’re not about shutting things down.” he said. “We’re about nurturing markets. We don’t want people NOT to use it. We know the market is fractionalizing. You wanna take our music and stream it and have electronic whatevers that play when you stick a chip into something or somebody? Go ahead! Do it! Just pay us!”
In a frightening display of to what lengths BMI goes to monitor venues here and around the globe, David DeBusk, the group’s VP of Business Development, showed off its Blue Arrow system. The system has a database with a capacity of 500 TB of music that can recognize eight million songs which it uses to monitor Internet sites, radio and TV stations around the globe, and can identify in 2 seconds if a copyrighted song is being played.
For many this poses a serious risk to how and when we use copyrighted music. Some fear the process becomes so automated that as Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and frequent critic of current copyright law, points out we run the risk of evolving “into a permission culture, where every single use of music creates an obligation to pay.”
The real threat BMI poses is to the countless mom and pop restaurants and bars around the country struggling to make ends meet in the economic downturn. BMI rarely sues and prefers a “kill-them-with-patience approach,” but the effect is still the same: prying money out of the hands of the desperate.
Such is the case of a small bar owner in Arizona who can’t even afford to pay her husband and a brother a wage for helping out. Despite being “one bill away for folding” Baker didn’t seem to care.
“I could tell she was low on money,” she said. “I could tell it was hard for her to shell out the money. But I also know music helps her make money. Or she wouldn’t have it. She and I knew she was doing the right thing.”
BMI was also among the groups trying to get an additional performance tax from wireless carriers by trying to argue that a ringtone, played in public when a user receives a call, constituted a “public performance.”
Stay tuned.
The part that irks me is when artists actually go to an establishment and play all original stuff. They gave the establishment the permission, they don’t expect royalties, yet these collectives come in and demand royalties anyway.
In cases like that, royalty collectives ensure that non-mainstream music stays out of public earshot. For most people, if they are going to pay a licensing fee, they may as well tell indie artists to shove it and throw on a Metallica CD. This is not nurturing a music market, it’s making it stagnant.
Actually, it is illegal to play the radio in restaurants. What most do like the one I work at is buy satellite radio specifically for restaurants. It has the fees already included in the bill. We’ve gotten in trouble for playing the radio straight out. We also got in trouble for have an acoustic guitar player, who only played on Wednesday night. They wasted us to pay $5000 dollars a year to allow it. Needless to say, now more acoustic guitarist on Wednesday.
This article makes it sound like they’re charging Mom and Pop for playing the radio… I hope that’s not the case, because that would be double-dipping.
As far as nightclubs go, these sound fair… music is what gets us in the door, and we pay cover charges and outrageous markup on alcohol to pay for it. It’s much more reasonable than what they were asking gyms to pay.
However, once again I’m cynical as to how much of this money actually returns to the artists.