PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic ASCAP Rant

Funny, but I have always thought that IT people are the most soulless bureaucrats on earth It takes a special kind of rules guy to turn a Personal Computer into a machine that can only be modified by people with administrative credentials.

Former RIAA employee here. Although our people may have told you that they were investigating file sharing among your small group, it was probably a cover story to throw the employees off what they actually knew. We didn't ever look at a small group of friends sharing files. That would have been a waste of resources. If we zeroed in on an IT department, you can bet that we traced a peer to peer file sharing operation back to your IP address and were trying to discover who was running it. That is the kind of large scale piracy that we could justify going after. Someone who started giving me a hard time and cussing me out would have gotten an extra hard look right after I turned a recorded copy of my interview over to his employer.

Sorry to disagree with your assertion as to the width of the net the RIAA cast in those years, Sandra, but that law firm paid out 7 figures to keep it quiet. It was the largest law firm in my state, and as such any sort of doubt as to their character would have been quite damaging. So they paid the amount of the extortion and moved on.

I never saw a cent, by the way, for the handful of songs under my copyright, a total of 23, stored on my drive.

I sent a letter directly to Hillary Rosen asking that the RIAA disbursement logs be made public (As well as demanding payment for my 23 songs that were on that server, though I am sure it would not have even been enough to buy a Snickers bar from the vending machine) so we could see all the "good" the RIAA was doing. She declined to reply. It is only right that the artists see all the good work the RIAA was doing on their behalf. I was particularly interested in seeing settlement data from the elderly people who know nothing about computers yet were taken to task for the actions of their grandchildren.

My best guess in the case of that law firm is that one particular former employee who was terminated about 4 months prior, and escorted from the building in handcuffs by security amid a fit of violent rage, was looking for any way possible to cause damage to the firm and reported the server, as benign as it was.

Again, I hate bureaucracy in any form.

I also see that this is your first post, and typically people who come here and make one post this acerbic are trolls, though it's been fun, and thanks for playing!!

I think it would make more sense if the license to perform music was paid by the musicians, not by the venue. My reason for thinking this is that the musician has a vested interest in the ability to play music... much more so than the host. The venue sees the costs incurred to offer live music as a liability to be circumvented. When this circumvention takes the form of trying to slide in under the radar... and they get caught... the predictable result is twofold:

1) that venue stops hosting live music
2) other venues take note of what happened, and some of them stop hosting live music too

If the license followed the band instead of the venue, then more places would be willing to host live music, and everybody would win. It would also open up many small venues that could never justify the cost of a license (such as those who only host live music a few times each year, like the one in this example)

It would also give licensed musicians an edge over those who tried to compete without their own license.

I like it, Pat.

Yes, sounds good, on paper, until the band (YOU) actually have to pay the FEE.

I suspect under that arrangement the fee would then end up being not ONCE (i.e., lump sum annually or even forever for some TBD catalog of songs) but for EVERY performance you make of said catalog, real-time deviations from catalog not allowed - without new fee structure - and and honor system to send in extra money when you want to deviate real-time would never be allowed.

You'd end up having to post your entire allowable catalog of songs so that customers (venues) could pick and choose which bands/musicians they want based on the catalog.

It would end up being - who has best or biggest Jukebox list.
Larry

Pat.

The musicians are already underpaid. So I would make less.

On the other hand, it would keep the amateurs who play for free on 'open mic' nights because they would have to pay to play.

So who knows if it would balance out with more gigs?

Insights and incites by Notes

Nobody is going to open mic nights to avoid paying for music. In my experience the crowd, if you can call it that, at open mics is about 10% regulars who could care less and 90% the open mic performers. You are just not losing gigs to folks having a little fun at open mics.

What was "acerbic" about her post? Just because she disagreed with your story?

Yeah, I understand the rational objections to a system in which the musicians pay the licensing fee. Nobody wants more fees. I'm mostly thinking out loud here, please hear it as an idea not as a lobbyist pushing an agenda. ;-)

my thinking:
Other trades that are licensed (plumbers, electricians etc) have a distinct advantage. Certain jobs can't even be bid on by unlicensed contractors. The license is money well spent, because they make way more than the cost of their license just by having it. Those with licenses can charge more for the same services, because it creates somewhat of a monopoly on their credentials.

Anybody who has ever prospected for gigs has heard "NO" at some point because the business doesn't want to open a can of worms by offering live music. Having your own license would answer that objection.

Based on the link Herb posted, I don't think the price threshold is that high given the small crowds somebody like me would play to... even if you had to pay per gig. The annual fee is even more reasonable. Like, what you might pay the roadie for one gig.

If your band were the only licensed entertainment solution in town, and you advertised as such... I have to think it would open up doors to you. Pretty soon venues would be asking the other bands "Do you have your own ASCAP license? We let ours go, so we only hire bands that have the license. You understand.. it keeps us in business..."

Nuff said.

I must respectfully disagree.

Here in South Florida venues that used to hire bands now hold open mic nights on Friday and Saturday nights. Since they used to pay musicians on those nights, it does take food out of the mouths of working musicians.

Sure the musicians are going there to have a little fun, but the club owner is saving hundreds of dollars by not paying them.

The owner gets paid, the bartenders gets paid, the wait staff gets paid, the cook (if there is one) gets paid, ASCAP gets paid, and even the people who scrub the toilets get paid. In the club owner's eyes, these people are worth more than the musicians.

And the musicians are agreeing that they are worth less than the person who cleans the toilets.

Plus the musicians bring their friends along who buy drinks and/or food so the club owner makes even more money by exploiting musicians who want to have fun.

You can't blame the club owner: free entertainment that brings their own business. I can blame the musicians though for allowing this to happen.

Most of the 'open mic' musicians have day jobs. How would you like it if someone came in to work one day a week on your job for free, and your boss gave you the day off and docked your pay for that day? That is essentially what you are doing to a fellow musician when you play for free in a for-profit establishment.

I'm not totally against playing for free. I go down to the VA hospital's nursing home and play for the disabled vets for free, I play for charities I believe in when I know that everyone else is volunteering their time, and I jam with other musicians either in non-profit venues or when I know the house band is getting a fair wage for the evening.

But as Pat mentioned, if the musicians were responsible for paying for the performing rights, perhaps the people who go to open mic nights wouldn't want to pay to play.

On a side note, I know the law does not agree and I advise people to follow the law, I feel that once a song gets to the Billboard hot 100 or equivalent, the public should be able to play these songs in a not-for-profit situation (like a condominium clubhouse party) without paying royalties under the Fair Use provision.

In the old days, the publishers and artists made money by selling sheet music. They didn't care where you played the music, you bought the rights to play it.

So perhaps if a musician buys a piece of music, he or she should be able to play it wherever he or she wants.

After all, if you own a book you can read it out loud wherever you want.

Just another thought to complicate the issue.

Insights and incites by Notes

So I assume you are also opposed to people using Band in a Box for live shows and recordings? Because it would be pretty hypocritical to complain about open mic folks while putting bass players, drummers, keyboard players, etc. out of work just because you found software that could do their job a lot cheaper, right?

Thank you Triple John for saying what I thought. I had no idea that I was being acerbic, being a troll, or playing a game. I was attempting to point out that Eddie's understanding of how the RIAA works is very flawed. Since he accuses me of being a troll (and since his signature says that he really doesn't post here anyway) I will simply invite him to stop commenting on my posts and to report them to the administrators if he thinks that I'm trolling. I regard his posts as more typical of the true troll so I would be more than happy to have the mods review our respective posts. Mr. Eddie, I will not be speaking to you but my fellow forumites and you can go play whatever game you think your are playing with others. I'm not one bit interested in having an exchange with you, but at least you had fun and thank you for playing. Now, go away and let my humble comments be.

I'm a 10 month lurker on the forum. My husband bought BIAB for me as a Christmas present. The comments that were made about RIAA was the first time I saw something that I actually knew something about and thought I could correct some misinformation posted by a person who knows little to nothing about the subject matter. The declared assumption that RIAA was alerted to a problem by a disgruntled employee led from the building in handcuffs is just the poster's assumption, which he admits, yet talks like it is a certainty. The most likely scenario is that someone on the server fired up a peer to peer program and had files in his shared folder that were owned by one of RIAA's member record labels. These are the conditions that result in investigations of the nature described.

I worked for Ms Rosen and can tell you that she probably had a pretty good laugh at the poster's demand for royalties. The RIAA doesn't collect royalties for artists. RIAA members are the record labels and distributors. RIAA lawsuits barely cover the costs of the anti-piracy program but in any given case, its impossible to say if the lawsuit, or threatened lawsuit is being pushed by the RIAA or a member record label. I'm zeroing in on the poster's claim that his employer settled for a sum above a million dollars. That indicates to me that a specific record label or labels identified a quantifiable number of internet shares of their intellectual property either originating or ending up on the computer of the law offices. High powered law firms as a rule don't pay out damages to avoid embarrassment over something they did not do unless the shared intellectual property was particularly embarrassing, like Gay [*****]. Of course if the readers would rather accept the poster's guess that the firm was a victim of a disgruntled employee please feel free to join him in his delusional world along with the rest of the world's conspiracy theorists.

I have less knowledge about how ASCAP does business but I can share with Mr. Norton what I know from conversations with ASCAP people. As I recall, ASCAP has a standard contract that they sign with Hospitals, Nursing Homes, and other health care services that are FOR PROFIT. Non-profits as I understand it are either left alone entirely or sign a contract that costs the facility a nominal amount per year. Any facility that is FOR PROFIT can sign a contract for a standard amount when they first open for business OR they can declare that they will never use any material that is under copyright. It seems likely that Mr. Norton's facility either declared that they were a non profit, or that they were for profit and did not ever use ASCAP's intellectual property. After they were in operation for several years, ASCAP then found that whatever initial declaration they made was fraudulent. That would result in ASCSAP seeking damages for the years that the facility was in operation under a false declaration.

Welcome... and quite an interesting read.

Glad something dug you out of the woodwork. So... tell us about yourself. Do you write, play an instrument, sing, etc...?
Have you dug in and used BB to compose something?

Hope you hang around and become a part of this community. you really don't need to know anything about a topic to comment here as an expert. (sorry... I thought that was funny) We have lots of discussions on many topics, so jump in if it's only to say you agree or not.

Of course, a well thought out reply such as you gave on this one always makes for interesting reading.

Welcome to the forums and the world of BB

We never played at an open mic night or a jamboree for the exact reasons that you mentioned. But, like you, we did play for free at a local VA hospital.

I also agree with you about the not for profit play issue. As long as no money is exchanging hands then you should be able to play without paying royalties.

I think that very few guitarists or bassists buy sheet music. They just get the chords, lyrics and tabs from the Internet. I also do that at times but I also have a ton of sheet music, music books, and fake books.

The above is only my opinion and YMMV.

Thank you Guitarhacker. I thought that was funny too.

I'm an Attorney with the State Government in North Carolina. As far as music, I'm a singer (contralto) and I've been trying to learn to play guitar for the last year or so. I have been using Band in the Box to help me practice what I learn and to back up my singing. I've dabbled with writing songs but I've not published anything or recorded anything yet.


Maybe one day soon I'll learn RealBand and start recording some songs.

Sandra McG, you are most welcome here!

We have a few irascible folks on this forum but by and large, we're quite friendly and even helpful. The reference to first posters applies to those who post one inflammatory message and never return, and we have indeed had our share of those.

You are not one of them. We greatly welcome your participation.

I've noticed it is confusing to some to understand what ASCAP/BMI do versus RIAA and SoundExchange. It's great to have someone here who does have experience with RIAA. I think you are correct; I don't recall RIAA coming up in discussions here in well over a decade.

I think we are comparing apples to oranges here. The situation you describe IMO is entirely different. Let me explain:

A single or duo using BiaB or other backing tracks will play in a place where the owner/management will never hire a trio or quartet, so no musicians are out of work.

The venues around here that traditionally hire larger bands still hire larger bands. The venues around here that have always hired singles and duos, still hire singles and duos. So who is out of work?

I know this from experience. I am in a duo where we play very small rooms on 'stages' where even a duo with a drum set would not fit. So who is out of work here?

However if a club that used to hire a quartet hired a duo with backing tracks instead, I'd agree with you 100%.

Last Friday we played at the very place where ASCAP is billing the condominium board of directors. Small room, perhaps 75 guests, they brought their covered dishes and alcoholic drinks, mixers and ice was supplied by the entertainment committee. We set up in front of the kitchen between two doors in a space I'd guess 4' by 10'. In front of us was the dance area (tables cleared out and replaced when done) and after the covered dish dinner the dance area was full until we stopped playing. A trio with a PA would have never fit there. So who is out of work?

Tuesday we played outdoors at a marina. They have music 7 days a week. Mostly singles and duos. They have been there since the 1940s and never hired bigger bands. So who is out of work here?

Wednesday we did a Yacht club for about 65 people in a 'cubby hole' so small the speakers wouldn't fit in with us. Leilani had to be careful not to hit her guitar against the wall. I'd guess 8' width max. Who is out of work here?

Saturday we did a mobile home park where a lot of Canadians spend the summer, perhaps 60 people. The 'stage' would have probably fit a quartet if the drummer had a small kit, but the park has been there since the 1960s and as far as I know have never hired anything but singles, duos and an occasional trio. So who is out of work here?

Back on topic. Is this a just cause for ASCAP to charge the condo where they bring covered dishes to a party a yearly fee? If so, I think the copyright laws need to be adjusted. But I've already learned 'my' government representatives may listen to me, but that's about it.

Insights and incites by Notes

Your argument works just as well for open mics. I could just as easily say those bars who sponsor open mics cannot afford to pay musicians so if not for open mic night there would be no music. So who is out of work there?

And you failed to address the fact that recording musicians lose work because of the use of products like BIAB and the products you sell.

Just to be clear, I support your right to replace musicians with your products. Just like I support venues replacing paid acts with open mics.

What I disagree with is complaining about open mics taking gigs from musicians while selling a product that takes jobs from musicians.

Very cool. Are you in or near the Raleigh area? Several of us are located within that triad area. Pat Marr I think is from the Winston area.... David Snyder is in Raleigh, I'm just east of Raleigh. In fact there's a songwriter's meeting run by David in Raleigh once a month. I've been slack about getting to the meetings, but with your job in a music related field.... I'm sure David would love to have you come and talk about what you did or do in that respect and how it relates to us ordinary musicians. We have a diverse group of folks who come to the meetings..... a few of them have BB but most don't. But it's not a BB group, it's a songwriter group.

Guitarhacker

I work in Raleigh and live in Durham. One of the reasons that I left RIAA is the job kept me on the road most of the time and I was ready to start a family. My government job doesn't involve any travel, but I have twin toddlers and another child on the way so I don't have a lot of time to invest but will consider getting involved. I already knew from my lurking that a lot of you guys live in this area.