Music Copyrights? Does Anyone Know?

Long story short, you CAN sing popular songs without "violating copyright" but you may owe the songwriters something for playing their songs. This falls into "performance rights," and you may have to pay royalties to the songwriters even if you don't get paid and there's no charge for admission. These payments are usually handled through "performance rights organizations." The three big ones are ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. Any bar or nightclub that has regular DJ's and/or live musicians playing popular songs, they (should!) pay some fixed amount to one of these PRO's based roughly on how big an audience there could be. There's lots of ins and outs with these things, but I was friends with someone who ran a "coffee house" where people performed popular songs, and she (also being a lawyer in her day job) looked into all that and figured out what to do, it cost about $150 per year to pay for the rights and be perfectly legal.

You don't have to credit the songwriters in a live performance - probably the usual way to introduce a song (if you even do this - you can just play one song after another without any talking in between) is to say "This is an Alan Jackson song" if he's recorded the most recent or most popular version, even if he didn't write it.

Songs performed in church services are exempt from this, and no rights need to be paid, but songs at some other event at a church are covered.

I think it's usual that the benefit organizers handle this, though if they don't probably no one's going to get a nasty-gram about it. But certainly if such a benefit is going to occur regularly (like once a year), they should look into this and pay the appropriate fees. Perhaps the worst thing about it is all the trouble of finding out what you have to do and where to send the money, as much as the actual cost.

Informative post, Ben.

JrFFKacy, I'm a Canadian too and I spent nearly two decades on the road in a bar band and we never had to worry about this stuff. It was always handled by the venue, we just showed up and played.

Up here it's pretty much the same as in the USA; any nightclub, coffeehouse, etc. that wants to have live music is responsible for making sure they pay the appropriate performing rights fees to what used to be called CAPAC and is now SOCAN (after merging with PRO Canada in 1989). It's just part and parcel of running such an establishment or event.

Yep. The event organizers should be the one to pay it. In our organization all the performers have to do is let the organizers know the names of the composers and arrangers for any given piece.

I'm having a copyright problem of my own. There's a song I want to do, but can't find out who owns the copyright. Can't even pin down the composer despite contacting everyone I can think of. I finally managed to get the address for one of the men who actually sang it and hopefully he can tell me when I write him. (If he's still alive, that is.)

BardSkye said:

Yep. The event organizers should be the one to pay it. In our organization all the performers have to do is let the organizers know the names of the composers and arrangers for any given piece.

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Interesting. In the club circuit, we never even had to do that. I believe the clubs just paid a flat amount to CAPAC based on the scheduled performance hours, and CAPAC used some sort of averaging system to determine how much of that money should go to where. One of the factors was probably radio airplay, since in the club circuit bands tend to play whatever is on the radio more than other songs. Therefore recording artists would be compensated based on that formula.

ChunkyC said:

Interesting. In the club circuit, we never even had to do that. I believe the clubs just paid a flat amount to CAPAC based on the scheduled performance hours, and CAPAC used some sort of averaging system to determine how much of that money should go to where. One of the factors was probably radio airplay, since in the club circuit bands tend to play whatever is on the radio more than other songs. Therefore recording artists would be compensated based on that formula.

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I think in the case of barbershop it's because most of the songs were not written as 4-part vocal music, so needed an arranger to convert them. And in order to get the chords to ring properly the notes can't just be assigned to any voice-part. The bass is usually on the root, the lead is wherever the melody takes him, the tenor an octave or two above the bass, and the bari jumps around taking whatever note is left to complete the triad. That takes an understanding of the musical form, hence needs an arranger. Arrangers are compensated the same as composers.

It's a small genre with virtually no radio play, and a good proportion of the "square" barbershop songs date from the early 1900's, so the formula for rock just wouldn't work for us.