strathspey@strathspey.org:44910

Anselm Lingnau

Re: The Strathspeyer's CD - Mix and Match - MCPS licensing

March 30, 2006, 9:26 a.m. (Message 44910, in reply to message 44903)

Iain Boyd wrote:

>   However, is any money actually given to copywrite holders who are not
> known to these two organisations - in other words, what effort do they go
> to to pay copyright holders of country dance music and music composed
> outside the UK?

If the MCPS/PRS is anything like the German equivalent, they don't worry their 
little heads too much.

There are two main sources of income to such an organisation. The one is, 
e.g., radio, where the broadcasters generally keep track (by computer, these 
days) of what music was played and royalties can be assigned to the 
respective composers/lyricists/musicians/publishers on a fairly exact basis. 
The other involves generic fees that one pays when one holds a public dance, 
disco or plays background music in a restaurant or shopping mall. The 
copyright institutions are not about to waste endless man-hours sharing out 
pennies according to which top-10 hits were piped to the punters in Bob's Bar 
& Grill, East Podunk, South Dakota (especially because Bob has better things 
to do with his time than to write them a list, such as frying burgers), so 
there is generally a flat fee in cases like this. The fee ends up in a big 
pot, together with additional contributions from, say, the sale of blank 
cassette tapes and tape recorders, which at least hereabouts carry a levy to 
cover the uncontrollable sort of copying where people tape music off the air. 

At the end of the year the money in the pot is divided among the »members« of 
the copyright institution, such as composers and musicians, according to a 
complicated scheme that the organisation does not deign to publish in detail, 
but which generally operates on the Biblical principle of »he who has, shall 
be given«. The assumption is that if you have contributed a lot to the 
repertoire of the organisation, and if your stuff is played a lot where the 
organisation can actually find out about it (on the radio), you deserve a big 
share of the pot; if your input is rather more insignificant and you are not 
played on the radio, you get comparatively little. Obviously this means that 
most of the pot goes to the bigwigs of the trade, and that this arrangement 
is geared towards keeping the likes of Madonna and Robbie Williams from 
starvation.

If you are a composer of country dance music, your creations are unlikely to 
end up on Top of the Pops, and since reels, jigs, and strathspeys are, as a 
rule, fairly short pieces of music you will have to come up with rather a lot 
with them to be able to compete with the composers of symphonies of more 
significant length (there is a bias in the distribution scheme that pushes a 
larger proportion of money towards the composers of classical music, since 
living specimens apparently deserve a little extra consideration). This means 
that, at least here in Germany, you would probably have to be Muriel 
Johnstone to actually recoup the annual GEMA membership fee. For the likes of 
myself, with two dozen little tunes to my credit and no chance of them ever 
being played on radio or recorded by a top-selling artist such as, say, Rod 
Stewart, GEMA membership is generally a non-starter, so we don't bother, 
hence we don't see any of the money when the pot is distributed at the end of 
the year.

The situation is a bit different with recording artists, who even in the SCD 
scene are usually members of the MCPS. This is on the one hand due to the 
fact that the CD manufacturing outfits etc. will gently but firmly nudge you 
in that direction (they also get a share of the pot at the end of the year), 
and on the other hand because you will presumably be entitled to some money 
directly if your stuff gets played on Take the Floor and the BBC does know 
that it did.

The other thing is that the MCPS/PRS (or local equivalent) can only license 
the use of the music that they are actually officially in charge of. They 
like to pretend that they do »own« every single interesting tune in the 
world, but this is not really the case. You can get out of paying GEMA fees  
for a function where you only play strictly your own arrangements of 
traditional music (where »traditional« means the composer has been pushing up 
the daisies for more than 70 years) and/or your own compositions (if you're 
not yourself a member), but as the presumption is that they own everything of 
consequence you have to prove to them that you played not even a single one 
they control (and don't let them catch you play »Happy Birthday«, which is a 
mainstay of the MCPS/PRS repertoire). So you send in a list of tunes, and 
they will usually try to claim a bunch of them even so, on the off-chance. 
I've had interesting run-ins with GEMA where they would make believe they 
owned the copyright on various tunes written by Niel Gow, William Marshall or 
J. Scott Skinner, all of whom easily fulfil the 70-years-dead requirement; 
normally you query these and you never hear back from them.

And speaking of background music in shopping malls, etc., there are people who 
specialise in composing »elevator music« who make a point of *not* being MCPS 
members so it is cheaper for the shopping mall operators to play their stuff 
because they do not have to pay for a MCPS license -- they pay the composers 
directly and save the overhead.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau, Frankfurt, Germany ..................... xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
The viability of standards is inversely proportional to the number of people
on the committee.                                              -- James Warner