On why the PRO charges for having the TV on in a bar when the TV station already paid for the performance right: The TV station paid for a performance in people's homes for private entertainment purposes. They did not pay for a public performance as part of a business. Similar to why the bar has to pay for playing a jukebox after they already bought the records that go into it.

The PROs use max capacity of a venue because it is an easily measured number documented in an official place (the occupancy permit) and not subject to change easily.

I have been doing quite a lot of thinking about the problem of tracking live performances and it is actually easier than you might think.

1. It does not have to track every performance of every song. The PROs don't even do that with radio stations. Instead they use a shifting pattern of random sampling.

2. Doing the statistical anlysis on hundreds of thousands of reports is no big deal; its what computers are good at.

3. Every venue generating serious money already has a computer terminal in it. I admit you have to look closely - its the credit card machine next to the cash register. Those things are more sophisticated than they look.

The approach I am taking is to separate the problem into separate tasks, each of which can have different technologies applied to it.

1. Performers prepare one or more set lists which are entered into a central tracking computer, indexed by an ID number. Like the list of 45 songs Davey mentioned. They do this at home over the web, assisted by various online indexes of all registered songs. Could also be done by mail for the less computer literate. Lists could be revised at any time but probably can remain the same for months at a time.

2. At the venue, Performer reports (using the credit card machine) that (A) he was there on that day, that (B) he performed songs from his set-list number X, and that (C) he performed N of those songs. Notice he doesn't have to report exactly which songs; just how many and from which list. He can have as many lists as he likes, representative of different sorts of jobs, such as his "wedding reception list", his "blues club list", etc.

3. At the central processing facility these little reports trickle in from all over. The credit card machines do this automatically. Each report is just 4 numbers: a date, the performer's ID number, the setlist number, and the number of songs played.

4. For each report they make a random selection of N songs from performer's setlist X and credit those with one performance.

Applying this process over thousands of venues over months of time gradually builds up a statistical picture of what is going on in live performance nationwide. This data is used to correct the simple extension of radio air-play that they use now.

There are refinements that can be made. For example it is probably not necessary for statistical purposes that every venue be tracked all the time. A rotating sampling method as used for radio may suffice. This is only an issue if customized software is required in the POS machine and I think I have a way around that.

The big challenges remain (1) keeping the operating cost of this scheme under the $2/day/venue that is coming in and (2) getting disorganized performers who could care less to bother making up the lists in advance.

A small scale test run of this system may be enough to prove to the PROs that their "live performances track radio play" theory doesn't hold water and they revise the whole thing.