Copyrighted Music in Pubs

The is is a picture from the ASCAP website. Their claim to be creating music could be seen as ironic.

I have some friends who play music in restaurants and pubs and the topic of music licensing has come up. It turns out that if copyrighted music is played by radio, TV or a satellite, the facility doesn’t need to pay for it, but if it comes from a live band or a CD, then they need to be licensed.1  I know that this is enough to persuade some owners to not have live music, because I know of a couple who don’t have live music for this reason. This leads me to wonder what this sort of copyright enforcement is doing to our culture. I talked to a friend who has played music since the 1960’s and he said it didn’t used to be that way. He thought that perhaps it happened about the time artists and music labels started losing money due to online file sharing. Perhaps the music industry needed to find other ways to make money as their traditional ones dried up. However, if there are fewer venues for people to play music, then there is likely to be less music created at a grassroots level.  Most bands will start by playing other people’s music and then go on to playing their own. That’s part of the evolution, but that changes when it all has to be paid for.  There is also more than one organization that licenses music so you may need to have more than one license or take the risk of being fined. So once again copyright can be seen to protect the artist, but it also can be seen to be suppressing new art. I say this because new music always builds on the old, so if people have less access to the old music, they will likely create less new music. It would be interesting to find out how much artists make from the licensing. Considering that it must be split amongst many artists my guess is that it can’t be much. However, maybe it’s worth is for the record labels. I would think that having a lot of people play your music would result in more people buying it.  I don’t claim to understand how the record industry works, but I think the music I likes comes from many people playing rather than the few who have big budgets backed a corporation. Much the way big blockbuster movies are rarely the best movies, the big budget music is not the best either.

1. 11 questions about music licensing. (2012, January 1). National Restaurant Association. Retrieved May 20, 2014, from http://www.restaurant.org/Manage-My-Restaurant/Operations/Front-of-House/11-questions-about-music-licensing

ASCAP

BMI