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<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Mike Dunbar:
I'm not talking about the discussion on this board. I'm talking about the practice of suing, legally attacking, the clubs. I agree with Brian. ASCAP and the other PRO's would, in the long run, be better off trying to educate and partner up with the venues. I think the goal here is to have more, rather than less, venues for live music.

I'll bet if ASCAP put one month's cost in money and time into studying and presenting the benefits of music, live and recorded, to a venue, rather than approaching them from an adversarial position, they'd end up with more revenue. We'd all end up with more music friendly venues.

The rest of my lament is about the turn of society in general, internet included, towards angry confrontation. We (all of us in general) are behaving like unsupervised children.

All the Best,
Mike

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Amen Mike Dunbar! You speak the gospel truth. Strangely, I was down at my folk's house a couple days ago looking in their bookcase and stumbled onto a book I'd bought my father a few years ago for Christmas:
The Death of Common Sense
"How Law is Suffocating America"
-by Philip K. Howard

Needless to say, I'm reading it now, and it applies every bit as much *and more* than when it was written in 1994.
At some point common sense must rule again.
I wonder where the PRO-s were during WW2 when practically every band member was union and nearly all the bands played cover songs. ? And, I also wonder how direly any recording artists or songwriters were hurt by said covers. Seems to me that people were dancing, music was playing, and the original recordings were being purchased as a result.

Personally... I have little faith that the PROs divide the money collected from bars in any kind of accurate or fair method.
Seems to me if you perform an enjoyable cover of an artist's song, and you were required to state the name of the original artist and name of song, the prompted sale of so much as one CD of that artist would nullify everything the PRO could yield in a year's time.
And..if all 3 PROs are to be paid by the bar..couldn't it add up to as much as 6 bucks per night?..potentially $1800 or so per year? Seems small... but a LOT of small club owners can't handle such a fee easily, particularly if they are paying the performers in the first place. Many club owners loose money to the musicians alone on certain nights.
The PRO actions toward night clubs come off as nothing more than mafia tactics to me.
I think it's a hassle everyone could do without. And honestly.. if that means the average artist here doesn't collect their annual 39 cents, so be it. Who would care, so long as this aspect of the songwriter/performer nightmare vanished?
Venues are far more important to retain.

-gary