Re: Composers should also get paid

["Kelly Coyle" <skcoyle@gmail.com>]

No, we paid it. I'm just certain it didn't pay for itself in increased revenues. Of course, that's a guess -- you have to decide who would have been there even without the music (or who would have come had there been no music), and then add whatever the listeners bought (which sometimes was precious little -- kids are poor). I suppose we could have had cover charges, but that's another can of worms. My feeling is, we were *so* low-budget and sub-professional that, I don't know -- do I care, really, if some kid down the street covers one of my songs? Especially if he's making no money at it.

We cut a deal over the CD license, as I recall. We couldn't afford it. So I think they took a few hundred dollars a year and let us play the radio under the reasoning that the tunes were partially paid for by being broadcast. It seemed kinda shady, to me, at the time. Maybe the heavy was giving us a break. Heck, maybe it was an outright bribe -- I didn't write the check.

On 7/13/07, Travis Hartnett <travishartnett@gmail.com> wrote:

This topic came up in a Seattle mailing list recently, and it was
determined that the yearly rate for your typical coffee house was just
under a thousand dollars.   Was that too much?
How much were you paying for your license to play CD's?

TH



On 7/13/07, Kelly Coyle <skcoyle@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can only speak for my own establishment, but we were providing the "living
> jukeboxes" more-or-less as a public service -- I seriously doubt any regular
> (i.e., small) coffeehouse can recover their ASCAP/BMI fees.