The ASCAP Follies of 2008

Yesterday, this was posted to the listserv of a local collective to which I belong. Looks like the vampires are out to suck each and every last drop of blood that they can! Motherfuckers.


Hi folks,

I had a rather unpleasant phone conversation with an ASCAP rep today, and we will need to discuss this issue on Sunday.

We had received a contract from them recently, after having left messages saying that we were not going to enter into an agreement with them. I called the ASCAP person who sent the contract to let her know that we are not going to do this and that we had the documentation that we've been giving to bands to show that we've been very careful not to have ASCAP music played in the space. Before I even got the sentence out of my mouth, she interrupted me, saying that if an artist "slips up" we're liable, etc. It just went downhill from there. I'll spare you the details here, but she used all kinds of intimidation tactics including threatening to take us to court and implying we were trying to break the law. She essentially said it was impossible to have live music without the license from them, and when I said that ***** has been doing it, she demanded I repeat the name so she could write it down and follow up on them (I didn't), stated that if they got into legal trouble it was my fault because I mentioned them, and demanded to know names of other places that aren't paying the licensing fee. She also said that any ASCAP musicians who played their own songs in the space and were paid need to pay a fee to ASCAP and that somehow we are liable if they don't do that, and didn't directly answer my question of, well isn't that between you and them? It was kind of amazing. She was actually angry. If I hadn't experienced it, I almost couldn't believe that anyone could be such a total jackass about this. If there had been any doubt in my mind that these people are just legalized gangsters, it is gone.

Anyway, we'll need to write a letter to them stating that we are not entering into an agreement with them and we need to be VERY, VERY clear with musicians that they cannot play ASCAP music and that they are responsible for reporting their pay to ASCAP. We may even want to have a contract for musicians to sign just to cover our butts. And we also need to make sure that the CD's we play aren't ASCAP - we may need to think about the movies we show too.

Grrr.