atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information ASCAP royalties & office music

A customer connected ASCAP regarding royalties for connecting a radio to their paging system for background music. They were informed that if the area is less than 3600 sq ft with a maximum of 6 speakers there is no royalty fee. This does not apply to MOH.

I Have to ask....

And the difference is?

From ASCAP.com

Music on Hold is not exempt.

The scope of the exemption in the old law had been unclear, and led to much litigation. The new law contains objective standards which will enable both music users and copyright owners to determine whether particular radio-over-speaker and television performances are exempt from copyright liability. Two types of music users are exempt, under different standards: a food service or drinking establishment(defined as "a restaurant, inn, bar, tavern, or any other similar place of business in which the public or patrons assemble for the primary purpose of being served food or drink, in which the majority of the gross square feet of space that is nonresidential is used for that purpose, and in which nondramatic musical works are performed publicly") and an other establishment (defined as "a store, shop, or any similar place of business open to the general public for the primary purpose of selling goods or services in which the majority of the gross square feet of space that is nonresidential is used for that purpose, and in which nondramatic musical works are performed publicly").

A food service or drinking establishment is eligible for the exemption if it (1) has less than 3750 gross square feet of space (in measuring the space, the amount of space used for customer parking only is always excludable); or (2) has 3750 gross square feet of space or more and (a) uses no more than 6 loudspeakers of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space; and (b) if television sets are used, there are no more than 4 televisions, of which not more than 1 is located in any 1 room and none has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches.

An other establishment is eligible for the exemption if it (1) has less than 2000 gross square feet of space; or (2) has 2000 or more gross square feet of space and satisfies the same loudspeaker and television set requirements as for food service or drinking establishments.

Lawyers!

I think you left out a key point. They are ONLY talking about off-the-air radio. If you use music from Sirius, XM, CDs, tapes, or your iPod you have to pay.

And, of course, the law continues to require that public performances of copyrighted music by other means such as live music, records, cassette tapes, CD’s background music services, video tapes or laser discs require permission obtained either from the copyright owners or from their performing rights licensing organizations.

-Hal

Thanks for pointing that out Hal.

You also might want to keep in mind that ASCAP is only one of three agencies. There is also BMI and SESAC who together with ASCAP represent most music. That means that if you are going to use music generally as available from say your collection of CDs or iPod, chances are that an artist will be represented by one of these three agencies so you will have to deal with all three. You can't just pay one and consider yourself covered unless you restrict yourself to those artists represented by the one agency.

The simplest way to handle this is to use a music service that will pay all royalties for you as part of the subscription. Otherwise it gets to be a nightmare.

-Hal

Okay Hal..what happened to your Pic?

I miss it!

It's moved to someplace that I cannot mention here.

-Hal

What about a Cable source (Time Warner,etc)?