August 10, 2004

The money flow from licensing

A rather self-serving article about how BMI disperses their collected monies to their hard working artists.

"Some of our business customers are surprised to hear that BMI never earns a profit," said Annastas. "Since its founding in 1939, BMI has had a unique business model."

Contrast that with this perspective:

I am a writer on "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere" which spent eight weeks at #1 last year. To make a long story short, here is the history of the royalty payments on that song:
January 2004-ASCAP $6K/BMI $20K(ASCAP matched)
April 2004-ASCAP $119K/BMI $135K(ASCAP matched)
July 2004 ASCAP total $99K/BMI $60K(drum roll please)
BMI REFUSED TO MATCH!!!!!!!

Posted by Casper at August 10, 2004 11:57 PM
Comments

Can you explain this more? I'm not familiar with how royalties from ASCAP and BMI work. Plus I don't see the contradiction, as BMI could very well be non-profit, yet not have enough money to match ASCAP's royalties.

Posted by: Scott Spiegelberg at August 11, 2004 10:06 AM

There's nothing totally wrong with BMI's position. I suppose I coupled the two articles together after reading the very self-congradulatory tone of the BMI release.

Both ASCAP and BMI (as well as SEASAC) use a proprietary method to determine how often a song is played in public (on the radio, in bars, at sporting events, etc.). From that, they pay songwriters and publishers performance royalities in according to said formula.

All the rights groups claim to be the best paying, most comptetive, so on and so forth. The unfortunate part is that a writer can belong to one and only one organization, so opportunities like the "Five O'Clock Somewhere" comparison are relatively rare.

I should probably write more on this; it's own post, if you will. Thanks for the idea, Scott.

Posted by: Casper at August 12, 2004 01:32 AM