JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Another ASCAP Controversy

Dawg,

I am happy to listen to your suggested program for how to collect accurately on every song played in every venue by every artist 365 days a year. This system would have to (among other things)

1. Supply the accurate song title, all the correct songwriters of that song (so it could be determined which of the many versions of "I Love You" were being played).

2. Ensure that accurate playlists were being submitted by people with zero motivation to care if they are accurate (and possibly even motivation to lie about what was played to give more money to their friends or favorites whether those songs were played or not). The simple fact that venues wouldn't know Hank Williams from Hank Snow from Hank Aaron when it came to writing credits is an issue by itself that makes a system like this impossible to imagine. How will they know song titles? How will they know accurate writers? In truth they can't. Even the artists playing the cover songs don't really know to much accuracy that a song they cover by Journey was written by people not even in the band in some cases. But they'd need to know this info to keep an accurate song by song record.

3. Once this information was accurately tracked, it would need to be submitted in some easy format to combine so that the 400,000 writers affiliated would get what was due. Of course things like duplicate names and titles and accidental or inaccurate song titles, mispelled names of writers etc.. would have to solved.

4. Once you have this perfect system, you have to pay for all the human manpower it would take at each stage to track and facilitate it. And of course since you're doing away the with blanket license concept, any writer who is NOT affiliated with a PRO (since their role would be changing and the protections offered by the blanket fee would be removed) could insist individual compensation which the blanket fee removes. (i.e. if you want to be paid today, you need to be a member of a PRO and accept the terms of the blanket fee.. if there is no blanket fee, it's every writer for themselves). This means that every venue (or writer if you pass the burden on to them) must track down and pay (or have a system in place to do it) each writer on the planet who might have written the song for direct payment.

Once all of this is taken care of, you have to determine the fees to cover both the process you created AND still leave money for all those little guys to get paid.

I am very interested in hearing how this could be done. Right now they are working on digital technology to track audio fingerprints of every song automatically taking all human input out of the equation. It's brilliant technology that already works and it currently being perfected to work on that scale. Then writers and artists both submit their songs to a database which tracks all media uses. But in a venue, unless each venue is hooked in electronically (which will happen one day, but not for a LONG time) and some time of identifiable system can tell Neil Young's version of his song from 30,000 other artits doing the same song in their own style, it will be a tough technological nut to crack. Most likely, what I see happening, is the same thing as we have now. The more accurate radio/internet system will be used to pay those live fees just as it has in the past, taking us righ back to the same discussion.

So, it may be complacency to not replace the current bad system. But someone needs to come up with a workable and affordable system.

As for Bob, I can accept that we disagree. I still feel that if a live artist doesn't want to pay to use someone else's song, then the easy solution is to not pay it. Why that such an unfair thing to you I don't know. They have a choice. Nothing is more fair than that. Songwriters should be able to say NO to having someone perform their song, but the blanket fee recognized by the courts means they can't say no. I'd be all for each artist having to clear permission to do each song individually if that made the system fair and accurate. I doubt most artists want to deal with that, though it seems to work pretty well through the Harry Fox agency and mechanical licenses.

Brian

[This message has been edited by Brian Austin Whitney (edited 12-30-2003).]