Mackey

You're totally right. If you don't think you'll ever have a performance that would be licensed or broadcast, there's no real need to join either organization. There's no harm in joining, though. When I first joined, there was an annual membership fee, but they don't even have that anymore, so it's totally free. It takes very little paperwork to join, and costs nothing, so you could really just join and forget about it until you happen to get a check. There's really nothing to lose, other than the time it takes to fill out that initial paperwork. I also think it's good to submit music for the ASCAP and BMI Young Composer Awards. They're really hard to win (I never won a BMI award, and didn't win an ASCAP award until my final year of eligibility), but it's good to get into the habit of applying for competitions like that. When you're young, those competitions are just about the only way to get any recognition. I think they even have a special tier of awards for composers under 18. Can't win in you don't enter! Oh, and you don't have to be a member to enter their Young Composer competitions.

I don't get why you wouldn't join... (Keep in mind that everything I'm saying applies only to the US.) You simply can't collect performance royalties and broadcast music royalties without joining ASCAP or BMI. It's not like Harry Fox, where you can join and have them collect your mechanical license fees, or you can do it yourself (which is what I do), since the law requires that a piece be licensed to be recorded. To play devil's advocate, I'll point out that ASCAP and BMI don't license churches, so if you have choral music that's only performed in churches, the performance licensing doesn't apply. But let's say Chanticleer records your choral piece. Their record label will obtain a mechanical license from you, regardless of whether or not you belong to Harry Fox, so at least that license will be covered. If that recording is then broadcast on the local classical radio station, unless you belong to ASCAP or BMI, you won't get a broadcast royalty. Radio stations pay those license fees to ASCAP and BMI, not to individuals. What if Chanticleer performs on a Christmas special on NBC, and they perform your piece? Again, if you don't belong to ASCAP or BMI, you won't get the broadcast license fee, because again, the broadcast networks and cable don't pay these fees to individuals. Fees are paid to ASCAP/BMI, cue sheets are provided by the network, and ASCAP/BMI distributes the royalties. There are venues not licensed by ASCAP/BMI (churches, high schools, middle schools, athletic events, military bands, and on and on), and I guess you can argue that if 100% of your music will only ever see those venues, you don't "need" a performance rights organization. But don't forget about things like the ASCAP "PLUS" awards, which are annual grants given to composers whose music is performed primarily in these unlicensed or underlicensed venues. I know one choral composer in the US who doesn't get much regular ASCAP money, but he does get a $5000 grant from them every year in recognition of what he's doing outside of normally licensed venues.

Surely you aren't talking about composers in America. Without ASCAP (or BMI), you won't receive any performance, radio, or TV royalties. There is no "DIY" in the US to make that happen. You either join BMI or ASCAP, or nobody will collect performance license fees for you. I can charge a rental fee to an ensemble, but there's no way I can collect performance programs from every American orchestra, concert hall, and college, and any fees associated with a given performance. (If I sell a set of music, there's no way I can even know about the performances, let alone collect performance license fees.) I can't monitor every radio station to see if I happen to have a piece on the radio, and if I did, it's not like I could send the station a bill for broadcast royalties. For concert composers with a large number of performances, these broadcast and performance royalties are potentially many tens of thousands of dollars per year that you'd have no chance of collecting on your own. And that's not even considering the special awards ASCAP (and presumably BMI) offers to subsidize composers who don't necessarily make that much in licensed performance income. If you are an American composer and you have any performances in any licensed medium or venue, I can think of no reason why ASCAP or BMI isn't a good idea. We can debate about which one is better, but to join neither would be crazy.

It's been years since I joined ASCAP, but at the time, my understanding was that 50% went to the publisher, and if there was no publisher, that 50% didn't go anywhere. I could have been wrong about that and simply misunderstood how it worked, since I was pretty young, and none of my peers ever gave any thought to the business element of composing so I couldn't ask them for advice. As for a publisher only retaining 33%, that's definitely not the norm in the US. I have never heard of any arrangement with any publisher that allowed the composer to see 66% of anything. That's a great deal.

I don't think I qualify as a "young" composer anymore, but I wanted to share some thoughts about a topic that some of you might be starting to think about: publishing. I'm self-published, and I've found that this is the best way for me to make a living. It's not for everybody, but if you're starting to wonder if publishing is the right choice for you, I hope you'll check out my recent blog entry about it: Music Publishing at John Mackey