ASCAP and the Ongoing Streaming Music Struggle

How do songwriters get paid -- or should they get paid -- for music streaming from someone's MySpace page? Or from an AOL Radio station? The sites and record labels and music publishing groups keep pushing and pulling in the courts about this. Now a federal judge has set up a formula at the request of ASCAP -- and it could mean the likes of AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks have to pay a total of $100 million to ASCAP's songwriters. That legal battle is far from over, so the rule may or may not stick.

(Just to put this into perspective, ASCAP represents 320,000 songwriters, so the ruling would mean an average of $312.50 to each ASCAP member. Of course, that's not how it would work. A couple hundred ASCAP members would get millions of dollars, and probably 315,000 of them would get pretty much nothing.)

If ASCAP wins such a ruling, the other major U.S. publishing entity, BMI, already has a licensing deal with online radio. It's the duty of ASCAP and BMI to collect performance-rights money for their members -- payments for every time one of their songs is played on a radio station, in a bar, on an elevator, etc. But it's never been completely clear what to do about something like a MySpace page or a tiny independent Internet radio station. Regular radio stations typically pay a little less than 2% of their revenue to ASCAP/BMI.

This is in addition to copyright royalties, which are already forcing some music start-ups to shut down. Sonific called it quits this month. So did Mobile Beat Radio. There's a tough balance to strike here for the artists and songwriters: They need to get paid but they also don't want to choke off entities that are getting their music out to the public.

FWIW, my songs are registered with BMI. I am one of the many thousands who stand to gain absolutely nothing from any agreement with Web sites. Although, I just recorded six songs with some terrific musicians in San Francisco, which I'll start putting online soon. I'm sure at least one will be a No. 1 hit and I'll soon be up there with Madonna and REM, raking it in...

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