[Fmpro] PRO strategy: need advice

[Mark Northam]

Hi Zev -

Great that you're on top of this!

You probably know this, but in case you or others don't, film performances
in movie theatres in the US pay zero performing rights from ASCAP and BMI, a
catastrophic loss to composers by any measure.

The story behind this has a familiar ring to it, sadly. Movie theatres used
to pay a "seat tax" up until the 1940s to the PROs. According to the book
"Pennies from Heaven" by Russell Sanjek, considered an expert on the history
of US performance royalties, ASCAP decided it wanted to triple the seat tax
being charged to the movie theatres. The movie theatres, at the time owned
by the movie production companies, decided they were going to fight the
tripled tax (who wouldn't?) and took the matter to court, claiming that
since their common owner had already paid the composer to write the music,
why should they have to pay the composer (through ASCAP) again to perform
the music that they already paid to have composed.

The movie theatres were victorious, and the precedent that ASCAP arrogance
created has been a financial disaster for composers since the mid 1940s. The
case was called Alden Rochelle v. ASCAP, and it's something they (ASCAP)
really, really don't like to talk about (or have discussed publicly). Alden
Rochelle ranks right up there with the "Girl Scouts incident" on the list of
things ASCAP wish would just go away.

But Alden Rochelle has it's own current offspring - the broadcasters
regularly use it as a "hammer" to beat ASCAP with, threatening to try and
use it as a legal precedent to become exempt from paying performance
royalties at all - especially in cases like FOX which and many cable
networks where they broadcast music that they have already paid for from
their production arms.

You figure that after this many decades, perhaps our friends at ASCAP would
realize that arrogance doesn't pay. But 1,250 signatures to get on the
ballot, some of arguably the world's most prejudicial weighting formulas
against instrumental music in the world, and an attitude that seemingly if
you're not a superstar that you're lucky to get any attention at all from
them seems to indicate that arrogance is somehow inbred into the songwriters
that run that organization. Either way, though, composers lose. They lose
with the weightings, they lose with poor tracking, they lose with movie
theater losses, and they lose with elections at ASCAP where real democracy
has given way to good-ole-boy politics done in secret by a ruling group that
will say and do anything to maintain their grip on power and whatever perks
their positions may provide, no matter how offensive those policies may
towards democracy.

Best

Mark Northam


On 10/1/07 8:03 AM, "Lev Zemlinski" <zemlinsk at yahoo.com> wrote:

> We have a lot of American films in theatres, and
> though the amount of screens is not so big as in USA,
> it is a real money. For example, the film which I
> wrote music recently makes about 200-250 k$ for
> weekend, or about 2000$ for one screen.