It is a serious hustle to work as a local musician. There are a limited number of venues in every market for any given type of music and in a city like Seattle, there are more bands and musicians trying to book them than there are calendar space for. Bands need to work and keep working and build momentum and a following to stay together and be relevant.
It's not easy for the venues either. Many of them, in fact, don't consider themselves venues. They're bars or restaurants or art galleries or some other business who does things to attract customers and entertain the ones they have. Music can be a great way to bring energy and community into a business and hopefully turn some people who came to hear the band into regulars, but musicians need to be paid and many of these places are not so flush on a nightly basis that they're able to budget for live music as well.
The ones who are sometimes feel another big shoe fall: They get a legal notice from ASCAP
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are the 3 major Performing Rights Organizations in the US. They do important work to ensure that composers are paid royalties when their songs are performed. However, is isn't clear how and usually doesn't feel equitable to small scale, local composers and bands to register with a PRO. ASCAP, specifically, is the biggest force with live local music around the US. I will not criticize or debate their worth, but here is a common occurrence that every working local musician and venue is aware of:
ASCAP contacts a bar or restaurant and informs them that they are in violation of copyright infringement because live music that is registered with them was performed in their venue. To become compliant, the venue must pay monthly or annual fees to ASCAP for the right to have music performed and there is a bill to resolve the current dispute. If the venue asks “when did this happen?” “which songs were performed that you hold the rights to” or any other series of reasonable questions, ASCAP declines to answer with more than something like “one of our representatives was present and documented the violations and if this goes to court, we will make that information available, but we don't have to answer your questions otherwise." The common suspicion is that they send that letter to any business who advertises a live music event and they have no way of knowing what songs were performed to specifically pay the composers a royality for. This usually gets into a protracted back and forth with increasingly threatening legal language from the PRO until the venue either pays them to avoid the legal dispute or much more commonly stops having live music. The ”venue" dies and goes back to just being an art gallery or pizza place or whatever.
Obviously, reducing the number of places to play and hear live music in any market is a bad thing. Clearly, composers need to have the ability to be paid when their works are performed. I've not registered my music with a PRO at this point, because I can't imagine how they would even know if someone at some other bar played one of my songs one night to pay me. I think the truth is that they wouldn't. They have some sort of a formula that makes payments to whoever owns Michael Jackson's catalogue based on record sales and air play, but they don't actually know every time a bar band plays “smooth criminal”. 99% of the time, I'm playing jazz and I can't imagine who, if anyone, gets a check when we play a Gershwin or Ellington song.
My solution? I've had an ongoing conversation with friends who also compose jazz about a co-op agreement where we grant each other rights to perform our compositions. I took some steps this week to formalize that with a contractual agreement and process for promoting shows and attesting that we will only play songs that we have full performance rights to: songs we have written and not registered with a PRO and similar works that we've been granted performance rights to by the composer. This would enable me to offer a contract to that bar or restaurant owner attesting that we would not perform any songs that ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or any other entity had enforcement rights to. We'll be testing this out in the next few months and I will report back.
If you have your own experiences, please feel free to share in comments. If you would like to participate, please contact me through this site.