Are some songs cheaper?? Do you just buy a huge license and some company distributes all that money?
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Public performance royalties flow from broadcasters to artists through dedicated administration bodies, known as PROs.
Basically the latter. A few large performance rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) administer most song copyrights in the United States. Radio stations acquire a “general license” aka “blanket license” which allows them to play all the songs from a given copyright society. Larger networks pay more, small radio stations pay less. The station reports back what songs it played, which the organization uses to determine royalties.
Surprisingly, only the composer/songwriter and publisher gets paid for the broadcast, not the performer.
They do buy a broad license that gives them the right to broadcast a huge number of songs, which is sort of like a subscription to a catalog – while that subscription is active, they can play any of the covered songs on their station. And in that contract, they agree to a fee schedule for any songs that they actually choose to air.
Then they are required to keep a record of every song they broadcast, which they report to the organization whose license they bought, along with the agreed-upon fee. That company then passes that money (minus their cut) down the chain to the individual companies (usually a record company) who own the license to that specific song. Then THAT company takes a cut, and they pay the artist(s).
yes they have special licenses. a lot of regions have their own system. same thing with live DJ’s on venue’s. usually that license is with a record label or group of record labels that give a list of songs that they can use and every use they get a fee.
You do have big licenses that allow the radio stations and other public performances play any song in the catalog for a flat fee. The only requirement is that the radio station keeps a record of which songs they have played so that the record companies can split the profits among the artists correctly. So radio stations have players which generate this statistics automatically. So it is not something the DJs have to deal with.
Yes, they buy licenses to certain songs. Usually in bulk with packages offered by record companies.
With the power of live assist and automation, digital aired logs can be sent to the royalty companies with an exact list of every song aired. Years ago, it was all written down and cumbersome to handle. A blanket license in the US from ASCAP and BMI covers most, if not all situations.
If Joe Schmoe wants to start an internet radio station, they have another company that handles licensing with smaller fees.
it’s funny how radio stations DO have a catalogue of MANY THOUSANDS of songs yet you still hear the same songs every day even if they play older music. 93.3 in Philadelphia right now is playing their whole catalogue A-Z and there are so many songs that I have never heard them play, it gets me thinking “if you have this many songs, why do you only play the same stuff every day?@
Somehow SiriusXM screwed this up and passes the entire music royalty fee to all of its subscribers. It sucks.
Even when I was at the mock college radio station (didn’t actually have a radio transmitter, just played over the ceiling speakers), we kept logs of what we played. I suspect this was training, but I’m not certain… it may have counted as public performance.
The gym I went to played the radio or various CDs in its paying-client spaces. It had a SOCAN (the Canadian music-licensing organization) sticker on the door, so they must have had some sort of license.
Even some borrowed videos from the library have markings allowing public performance. The rest are “private home use only”.
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