Oh I agree with you. The musicians are the weak link in my scheme.

Even preparing the lists can be a chore without a lot of help (for which I have other ideas, some possibly patentable). Say you wanna sing "Amazing Grace". BMI lists over 755 songs with that title! Unless you know the author's name of the one you plan on doing, how are you going to select it? 88 of those are variations by the same guy. Yikes.

Ok, more focused: "Coat of many colors". Dolly Parton, right? No, turns out there are 9 songs by that name. And the BMI repertoire database by itself doesn't cross index by artist, though their online web site database does.

(Btw, Parton has 571 songs registered to her name, one of which is titled "Amazing Grace"! I'll bet a lot of these 755 AG's are just different arrangements.)

A better approach to getting this changed may be a bunch of grad students in one city doing a survey of the live music scene for one month and comparing the observed song lists with what is on the radio in the same city. If it isn't the same list, the PROs got some 'splainin to do. Somebody could do a PhD dissertation...