Businesses Pay To Use Music
Music copyrights are actually a bundle of different rights. One right in the bundle is the right of performance. If a piece of music is performed in public, the owner of the music generally has a right to be paid for that performance. Restaurants, bars, music clubs, and retail businesses that play music in the background, or that have live performers, all must pay for the right to play the music in their business.
Payment is accomplished by purchasing a license from one or more of the performing rights societies. In the US, there are three performing rights societies: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Each of these societies represents thousands of songwriters in the collection of performance royalties. Business purchase licenses that cover the performance of any music in that society’s catalogue. Each society has a detailed rate schedule that takes into account the size of the business and how they use they use the music, and rates are generally quite reasonable - the catch for a business is that when looking at any given rate quote, they will need to anticipate increasing it by three, as most businesses do and should purchase licenses from all three societies in torder to ensure that all music played is covered. SESAC now has a service that provides streams of SESAC only music which may fit the needs of some businesses, and which would lower licensing costs considerably as only one license from SESAC would need to be purchased. This solution will not work for all businesses, but is quite convenient for those that can use it.
August 6th, 2007 at 12:52 am
Paying for playing music makes sense because music is a form of creativity and is the intellectual property of its creator who might have spent sleepless nights for creating it. The creator needs to be rewarded for it. By the way this post is good source of information for the start up restaurants, bars, music clubs, etc.