Recording - October 2010 - 38

By Todd Gascon and Bruce Kaphan

Chapter 7: Income Earned by songs—Part 2
Last month we opened the discussion of the ways individual songs can earn you money by looking at Mechanical Royalties. This month it’s time for us to consider Performance Royalties, Synchronization Fees and income from Print Fees. Performance Royalties These are royalties paid to you for the public performance of your songs. Examples would include, but are not limited to: songs played on radio, at a club or background music in a television show. They also include performances of songs in an elevator, on web sites, and music channels on airplanes and cable television (e.g. Music Choice). royalties to you. It is important to note that PROs in the United States only collect the non-dramatic public performance of compositions. For any dramatic public performance of a composition (e.g. live theater, opera and ballet), the producer of the play, opera or ballet would enter into a license directly with the copyright owner of the song. For example, if someone wanted to use your song in his Broadway play, he would negotiate directly with you rather than your performing rights society. As an aside, you might wonder why I haven’t spoken about movie theaters and their obligation to pay public performance fees. As a result of litigation that occurred more than 50 years ago, movie theaters in the US do not

Despite the trends toward low-fi (mp3, etc.), You’ll still want to have high-resolution copies when a film producer calls to license one of your TRACKS.
As the copyright owner of your song, you have the exclusive right to publicly perform it. That means no one is permitted to perform your song in public without first obtaining your permission. In order to allow others to perform your song (e.g. play it on the radio) you will need to grant a license to the third party seeking your permission to perform your song. Since it is not practical for you to do this on your own, you will need to affiliate with a performing rights organization (“PRO”) to do this on your behalf. In the United States, there are only three such organizations: ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. If you’re lucky enough to find your songs performed outside of the United States, your PRO will collect that money for you from the PRO in the country where your song was performed (in Japan it’s JASRAC, in Canada SOCAN, etc.). These foreign PROs tally performance of your work, then report it, making payments to your USA PRO which then in turn pays these
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RECORDING OCTOBER 2010

have to pay ASCAP, BMI or SESAC any monies for the public performance of songs that appear in a film. Therefore, if your song is used in a film, you will not earn any public performance income while the movie is played in a theater. However, when the movie is broadcast on television, you are entitled to public performance monies and these monies will be collected by your PRO. Bruce here: If you want to receive royalty payments when your music is “performed” as Todd describes above, you’re going to have to take care of some business before your recordings are released. You’ll want to choose a PRO. My suggestion is to investigate which PRO other artists doing work in a similar genre to yours have chosen, and consider choosing that one for yourself. I’d also encourage you to either phone the membership department or investigate the websites of the three PROs to get a feel for how these companies treat you and represent themselves. I mention ASCAP in examples
Recording - October 2010

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