Sundays
Solo Guitar
NEW HOURS
5-7
RAINBOW GARDENS
203-878-2500 117 North Broad Street. Milford, CT 06460 www. rainbowgardens. org
A program of Original and Public Domain material.
Due to the recent harassment
of the establishments at which i have been playing by BMI and ASCAP, I will no longer be listing all of my gig dates.
These organizations, while claiming to be on the side of the musician, have done so much more harm than good in local markets. For years, they have been putting me out of work by demanding fees from small restaurants which use solo instrumental live music as a background....not as a draw. The result generally is the restaurant owner not wanting to pay extra fees and simply getting rid of the music!!!
The tactics of these music licensing organizations need to be examined by state officials, as they lie to unknowing proprietors, claiming they will need licenses even if a musician is playing only original music. This is an outright lie which I have heard twice in the last week!! When I personally confronted a BMI official about this, he backed right down and said the restaurant must send them a letter explaining that only non BMI music will be played in their establishment.
Does this not sound unconstitutional??? Restaurants must report what they are doing to BMI when none of their music is even being used??
not to mention........the fees are distributed to the "artists"
ASCAP & BMI -- Protectors of Artists or Shadowy Thieves?
By Harvey Reid
ASCAP's "random" taping of some 60,000 hours of radio airplay as the basis for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars has been challenged as having too much inherent error; that it is not provable that is it indeed a fair and just way to compensate copyright owners for use of their work. For example; currently, the percentage of fees paid by public broadcasting stations is somewhere between 5.8% and 6.3% (depending on whom you ask), yet the sampling system only samples these stations 690 hours per year, which divided into 1500 stations comes to 27 minutes per year per station, or about 4.5 seconds a day, and slightly more than 1.1% of the 60,000 hours. The system is clearly top heavy and greatly favors the few who get heavy airplay.