I guess I am still a bit disenchanted and skeptical about the amount of effort the PROs are expending and the manner in which the effort is proportioned.

BMI's website proclaims in a banner across the top of the page $1.6 BILLION DOLLARS TO BMI WRITERS AND PUBLISHERS. If BMI is 1.6, then I figure ASCAP has got to be 2.0 to 2.5 billion and SESAC maybe .5. So, at the low end, we are looking at 4.1 Billion dollars, all trickeling uphill to the most successful writers and publishers, with close to zero going to the new and struggling folks.

I find it difficult to believe that given todays current technology, which can give the name of every passenger on every commercial aircraft in the sky, at any given time, that organizations tasked with collecting and dispursing billions of dollars to writers and publishers cannot even attempt to find a better way of tracking the songs being performed.

Given the technology available 20 years ago, you can pick up any bottle or can of beer from a major brewery and call them, read them the code off the container, and they can tell you which plant brewed the beer, what line and shift it was bottled on, and which wholesaler inventoried it.

Given the bar codes within the Universal Product Code system, every cd sold in a retail store can be tracked, from pressing to purchase by consumer.

Although I am a member of BMI, this thread has caused me to take a harder look at the organization. This entire thread started because the PROs threaten to sue small retail establishments. Yet, in order to join BMI you must sign a contract whereby you waive the right to sue them.

Until the PROs make a firm committment to explore and implement a more equitable system of royalty disbursal, I will remain skeptical.

I feel that statements like, "it is the best system available now" foster a complacency that benefits only the status quo. I would like to see a substantial budgetary allocation within these billion dollar organizations towards the establishment and implementation of a vastly improved tracking system. Offer a million dollar prize to Cal Tech or MIT for an accurate computer tracking program which meets the criteria the PROs establish. Get some smart people from outside the music industry working on it. If the three PROs formed an alliance to sponsor such a competition, and the prize were pro-rated, none of their executives would have to give up a single day of vacation.

To continue to replay that old saw, "this is the best we have at this time" only indicates an organizational resistance to change in an industry which professes to embrace change and seems to reflects a mindset of, "I've got mine ... the heck with you."

Hey, I have been wrong a lot. But I am not afraid to post my questions and opinions, and I am not collecting one cent of my salary from songwriters.

dawg

Wisdom does not always accompany age. Sometimes
age just shows up alone.