Re: Royalties paid by non-profit stations

[riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley)]

In article <8907062011.AA13134@GAFFA.MIT.EDU> Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu> writes:
>I dug into the matter of royalties paid by the college radio station I
>worked at and found out that I was indeed partially mistaken.  I was
>correct in that the station does *not* pay a per song royalty.
>Instead it pays an annual licensing fee to ASCAP and to BMI.  The
>annual fee to ASCAP is $150 and the annual fee to BMI is about $250.
>These annual fee allows the station to play as much music licensed by
>ASCAP and BMI (which covers the vast majority of music on US or
>British record companies) as they want.  I have no idea how ASCAP or
>BMI then decides whish artists get what share of the money.

This is actually a major source of irritation for many alternative radio
stations.  ASCAP and BMI do playlist surveys, to see what songs are being
played how much.  They base the artist payments on the results of these
surveys.  And they generally only survey large mainstream radio stations,
completely ignoring college stations and other alternative stations.  So,
all those artists that only get played by alternative stations (including
Kate) generally don't get any royalties for radio play.

Disclaimer:  I'm no expert, and I don't have a station manager handy at the
moment.  I just remember a lot of arguments on the subject about a year or
so ago.

-Dan Riley (riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu, cornell!batcomputer!riley)
-Wilson Lab, Cornell U.