Past Blogs:

    It Was A Long Way To Fall (1.3.08)

    Stories...Available on CD Baby (12.6.07)

    What's been going on? (12.21.06)

    Playing at the Canvas (8.26.06)

    Thoughts On The Bistro (8.10.06)

February 5, 2008

The Evil Empire of ASCAP

I’m taking a break from talking about my new CD this week to write about how evil ASCAP is.  I recently called a café that I have performed at in San Francisco for many years.  When I first came to the Bay Area I played at the Sacred Ground’s open mic night. I’ve met many local musicians at the open mic and played shows at Sacred Grounds on Friday and Saturday nights over the years.  It was a great place to network and hang out.  The thing that amazed me the most about Sacred Grounds was that it was the longest running open mic night in the Bay Area.  Acts from all over the country knew about Sacred Grounds and would come off the street on a Thursday night and blow the place away with their music.  Sacred Grounds was a hidden treasure in the Haight-Ashbury where new timers and old timers would share their original music and play covers of obscure and well known musicians.  And it was the covers that did them in.

When I made my call to Bruce, the owner of Sacred Grounds, he told me that they had stopped the open mic nights and his spots on Friday and Saturday nights for singer / songwriters.  I asked him the reason and he simply said ASCAP was asking for thousands of dollars in back royalties for all the performers over thirty odd years that had played covers in the coffee house / bar.  I believe it was in the tens of thousands to be exact.  So Bruce, an independent business owner had no choice but to shut down music at Sacred Grounds.  He would have had to sell his business if he paid the royalties.  Bruce was also the only venue in San Francisco that was being targeted by ASCAP.  The sad reality is that a long established venue was shut down from booking local artists because ASCAP felt on a whim that it wanted to bully a café.  ASCAP’s answer to why Sacred Grounds was targeted was simple.  ASCAP told Bruce they hadn’t gotten to other venues in San Francisco yet to ask them for back royalties, but they would in the near future.

I thought ASCAP was supposed to protect musicians and help them.  Not shut down places for musicians to play.  The sad reality is that like so much of the power structure in the music industry, they don’t care about independent musicians.  They only care about big artists who don’t even own most of the profit sharing rights to their music in the first place.  It’s about corporate music lining the pockets of corporate music.  In the mean time independent artist have lost a venue that once use to have Ben Harper and Tracy Chapman try out their music in front of other artists.  How do good musicians become great musicians other than being allowed a start and a place to learn how to craft their art?  If ASCAP has its way no one will have a place to play.  Pretty soon the only artists that will exist will be corporate Pons raised by The Mickey Mouse Club, because ABC will be the only company that can pay back royalties for their artists. 

 The reality for ASCAP is that they are scared.  They’re scared of local artist like me and many of you out there.  They can’t control us.  We use distributors that give us more of our profits for our creative works than they would ever dream of giving us.  The digital world is a platform to share and a place for anyone to become famous or well known.  We can do it without them.  We don’t need to pay them dues for them to ignore us in favor of big company acts.  We can now sell directly to local fans and people around the world. They’re going broke. There is no need for ASCAP and that’s why they’re scared.  They have to extort money from open targets like Bruce in San Francisco.  Just like the big record companies sue teenagers for downloading music.  They don’t have any control over the internet age and they know it.  As for Bruce, every couple of months ASCAP has called him back and reduced the price he needs to pay for back royalties.  At first it was just $5,000.  Two months later it was down to $1,000.  The last time ASCAP called it was only $300 for all thirty years.  ASCAP asked Bruce if he was ready to settle.  His response was that he would settle when they asked him to pay nothing at all.  So who really holds the power?