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below, because I’m an ASCAP writer and publisher member and can relate my personal experiences. Please don’t consider my affiliation with ASCAP as an endorsement: do your homework and choose the organization that best suits your needs. Before the advent of radio and television, people in the United States learned about new music by hearing it performed in vaudeville acts or at the theater. In order to get their work performed, songwriters engaged the services of a music publisher. The publisher in those days would have had access to printing tools and a distribution network, making its services necessary to most songwriters. In order to compensate the publisher for his or her efforts, the industry developed a “publisher’s share” and “writer’s share” of the income earned by the song, which was traditionally split 50/50. With increasing frequency, as affordable publishing tools have proliferated, savvy songwriters have formed their own publishing companies, eliminating the need for a third-party publisher in many cases. Most notably, for the small independent artist, self-publishing is a relatively easy way to double your “performance” earnings. How it plays out: When a piece of music is “publicly performed” and a PRO notices (I’ll discuss this more later), a certain amount of money is collected from the venue where the

songs are being played, but not on traditional broadcast media, this could provide you with some compensation. Been there and done that! I either know or have worked with people who have chosen one of each of these three organizations, and I don’t know anyone who is thrilled with the level of service they receive from any of them. I know I’ve had to go to extraordinary measures to get ASCAP to pay attention to me. Sadly, all I can say is that you should treat your relationship with these organizations as semi-adversarial. What I mean by that is that if you feel you are not receiving royalties when you think you should be, you’ll need evidence to prove your case. When you release a recording, and thereafter, I highly recommend surfing the net every so often, and saving page grabs or printing out radio playlists indicating your title’s activity. When your PRO statement comes in reflecting no airplay, if you can wave these papers in front of the PRO naysayer, you may find some recourse. Without the evidence, you have nothing. Synchronization Fees These are the fees that you earn from the use of your song in a motion picture, television program or commercial. Unlike mechanical royalties that have a specific rate, there are no set fees for the use of a song in an audio-visual work. The fee paid to you for the use of your song in an audio visual work will depend upon a variety of factors including:

As the copyright owner of your song, you have the exclusive right to publicly perform it. no one is permitted to perform your song in public without first obtaining your permission.
music was performed (i.e. a night club) or a company broadcasting the song’s performing (i.e. radio station, television network), and subsequently, once administrative fees have been deducted, this money will be paid to the writer and publisher. For a hypothetical example, let’s say that $100 is collected from the broadcast television network that “performed” your song PRO Blues. When your PRO collects this money (for this example let’s pretend there are no administrative fees), it immediately gets split into two equal piles—$50 for the writer and $50 for the publisher. If the work was properly registered and the writer hasn’t signed any agreements directing otherwise, the writer should be issued a statement (ASCAP does it quarterly) that includes that $50. Similarly, the publisher should be issued a statement including that $50. If the writer is also the publishing company owner, then the writer/publisher will receive the whole $100. Earlier I stated that royalties will be collected by your PRO if it “notices” performance of your work. The sad truth here is that keeping track of every piece of music ever “performed” is a Herculean task. For example, ASCAP currently employs a variety of methods to track performances. For more details, visit www.ascap.com/about/payment/paymentintro.html. Unfortunately, their tracking system favors more popular artists because it is the larger stations that pay more money and therefore get more attention. To their credit, ASCAP offers a special program for new artists whose work finds them flying under the radar and outside of traditional broadcast media. This program is known as the ASCAP Plus Award: www.ascap.com/ascapplus/. If you have evidence that your
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• The budget for the entire motion picture and the music budget • How the song is used (sung by character, background) • Stature of song being used (current hit, famous standard, etc.) • Duration of the use (10 seconds vs. 1 minute) • Multiple uses in the motion picture • Use of the song as a dramatization of the events described in the song • Territory of the license (the world, specific countries) • Any change to the original lyrics • Use is over opening/closing credits • Whether there is a guarantee that song will be used on film’s soundtrack album. Bruce here: For those of us who scratch away at the fringes of the music business, there’s usually no more potentially lucrative possible use of your work than synchronization, often also referred to as “licensing”. If you’re lucky enough for someone to choose your music for use in the applications Todd describes, you may find yourself in a position to both earn some money and have your work presented to a potentially huge audience. Personally, I’ve never had much luck trying to force this kind of business, so I just try to continue to make interesting music and hope that every so often the phone will ring and there’ll be someone on the other end of the line who likes a particular track they heard and wants to use it. From there, it’s just a matter of negotiating a fee and terms. I usually rely on my music business attorney (Todd) to do this part of it for me. In the long run, he’s had more experience with

http://www.ascap.com/about/payment/paymentintro.html http://www.ascap.com/ascapplus/

Recording - October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2010