[78-L] Smallest Transcription Disc?

[Ken "Silver Showcase"]

Michael Biel wrote:
>   On 8/6/2010 10:45 AM, Jeff Sultanof wrote:
>   
>> Good point, but just because someone might have become an ASCAP member
>> doesn't negate that some of his music is represented by a performance
>> organization other than ASCAP,
>>     
>
> Back in the late 70s when I would take classes on tours of NYC media, 
> and one year we went to both ASCAP and BMI.  BMI calculated payments on 
> the basis of lists that a sampling of stations compiled of a couple of 
> weeks of their programming.  They asked stations to list ALL music 
> played and not to rely on the record label to determine if it is BMI or 
> not.  Composers or their publishers change affiliation all the time, 
> they said.  They have a new list every week.   By the way, ASCAP figured 
> from tapes of radio stations provided by a team of monitoring.  They had 
> a roomful of TUNE EXPERTS who identified the songs no matter what the DJ 
> said or did not say!
>
> Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com

I worked at a small radio station for 26 years and we had to keep the 
logs for BMI.  Once each year for a certain period of time - I don't 
remember now if it was one week or two weeks, we had to write down every 
piece of music we played and the composer credited on the label.  We 
were told that these logs were shared with ASCAP as these companies knew 
that stations would object to doing two sets of logs.  I've never heard 
anything about tune experts monitoring tapes of radio stations.

Stations who used pre-programmed tapes only had to send in the playlists 
of their tapes that they aired that week.  But since we played directly 
from 45s and LPs we had to keep the hand written logs.  Certainly there 
are worse things to do but keeping those logs was a real bother.  
Fortunately we only had to do it once a year.

Another issue between radio stations and ASCAP/BMI is that they 
sometimes would send representatives to your area to see if businesses 
were playing your station in their stores where the public could hear 
them.  If they walked into a local hardware store and heard your station 
playing they would tell the store management that THEY had to purchase a 
license or stop playing the radio station in their store!  The stores 
thought that WE had sent these guys to suck money from them.  ASCAP/BMI 
never bothered to explain to these businesses that we didn't get a penny 
of that money, and so we got some angry calls from the managers who were 
very upset that we'd try to extort money from them in this way.

Its been several years since I was on the radio and even longer since I 
played music and had to keep those logs.  I hope things have changed 
since then.

-- Ken