Performing Rights Organizations
Performing rights organizations are businesses
designed to represent songwriters and publishers and
their right to be compensated for having their music performed
in public. In order to comply with copyright
law, any establishment that plays copyrighted music is legally
required to secure permission to use copyrighted music, whether in a live performance
or by mechanical means. In the US, a music user can
do this by securing licenses from the three performing rights
organizations recognized by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 - ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. Distributors
of digital audio transmissions of sound recordings must secure a license from SoundExchange.
Many of our artists should consider being members of both
ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and SoundExchange, as they represent
different copyrights and two different streams of royalties.
American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is
a membership association of over 225,000 U.S. composers,
songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers of every
kind of music. ASCAP protects the rights of its members
by licensing and distributing royalties for the non-dramatic
public performances of their copyrighted works. ASCAP's
licensees encompass all who want to perform copyrighted
music publicly. ASCAP makes giving and obtaining permission
to perform music simple for both creators and users of
music.
BMI is
an American performing rights organization that represents
more than 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers
in all genres of music.
SESAC (Society
of European Stage Authors and Composers) is a performing
rights organization with headquarters in Nashville and
offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. SESAC
was founded in 1930, making it the second oldest performing
rights organization in the United States. While SESAC
is the smallest of the three U.S. performing rights organizations,
it prides itself on developing individual
relationships with both songwriters and publishers, and
claims to be the technological leader among the nation's
performing rights organizations and the first P.R.O.
to employ state-of-the-art Broadcast Data Systems (BDS)
performance detection.
SoundExchange is
the performance rights organization designated by the U.S.
Copyright Office to collect and distribute performance royalties
for recording artists and sound recording copyright owners
(typically record labels or recording artists themselves)
who are entitled to royalties for the digital audio transmissions
of sound recordings by satellite radio services (XM and SIRIUS),
webcasters (such as AOL, Live 365, and Yahoo), and digital
cable and satellite television music services (such as Music
Choice, DMX, and Muzak). |
