These are called Performance Royalties. BMI, ASCAP and SESAC and entitled to collect income for the copyright owners. Your restaurant obviously made the right choice by hiring you! The music you play is in the public domain and there are no copyright owners (unless you play some arrangement that is copyrighted).
I am not a lawyer and don't play one on TV, so maybe Howard or another legalist-lutenist can confirm this. On Aug 15, 2010, at 3:40 AM, Peter Nightingale wrote: Dear All, I play my lute regularly at a local restaurant, music from before 1650 exclusively. The owners have been contacted by BMI and were told that they need a license. BMI states on its web page that: "Broadcast Music, Inc. collects license fees from businesses that use music, which it distributes as royalties to songwriters, composers & music publishers." (All of it, except 97% which unfortunately has to go toward administrative overhead to keep the Musical Loss Ratio in the acceptable range?) Putting it generously, I would call this BMI claim dubious and my question is: am I missing something here? Is this legitimate? If so, does John Dowland have a Pay Pall account to receive those royalties? (In that case, we have finally, once and for all solved the pronunciation issue; it's: "Semper Doughland, semper Doughman.") How about Anonymous? Thanks, Peter. the next auto-quote is: So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we've taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. (Paul Krugman) /\/\ Peter Nightingale Telephone (401) 874-5882 Department of Physics, East Hall Fax (401) 874-2380 University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI 02881 To get on or off this list see list information at [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html Ed Durbrow Saitama, Japan [2][email protected] [3]http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/ -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 2. mailto:[email protected] 3. http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/
