[Fmpro] Dave Joining ASCAP/BMI

[Les Mizzell]

> But, it was your fellow-creatives at the ad agency who under sold your work.

Exactly - and they had the power to hire you or not. They did it to 
*everybody* - you had two choices - you worked on their terms, or you 
didn't work.

That's the way it was and that's what was accepted, and being sorta 
sheltered (and stupid), we didn't know any better either.

A drummer friend of mine that did session work for about everybody in 
town that wrote, visited a guitar playing friend of his in Nashville one 
day. The guitar player said, "Hey, I've got a session across town today, 
come with". So he went. The session drummer didn't show up for some 
reason, and he ended up playing drums on a commercial for Tombstone 
Pizza. He got paid for the session, and happily went home with some $$ 
in hand.

The following year, he gets a check in the mail for close to $16,000 
(residuals, right?), just for having played the drums. He almost 
*immediately* packed up his stuff and moved to Nashville.

*That's* when we all figured out it was being done differently 
elsewhere, but there still wasn't anything that could be done about it. 
If you refused to work for what the agencies offered, then you didn't 
work and they'd just find somebody else that would do it for even less.

I certainly raised enough hell about it, and now pretty much find myself 
"unemployable" by anybody in *this* town. All my clients are elsewhere...

Oh well....