The Vail nightclub 8150 is getting sued by Jimmy Page and Van Halen for allowing bands to play cover songs in the club without paying ASCAP and BMI. In order for bands at the club to play cover songs, the club needs to pay the licensing dues (and report on everything that’s played), not the performers.
It’s an unfortunate situation – you hate to dictate to a band that they can’t play any cover songs. Especially if the band feels the vibe of the crowd, and decides it time to roll out “Heartbreaker” or “Black Dog”. So many bands get their start playing cover songs (Led Zeppelin and Van Halen included), it’d be a shame not to let them perform them onstage.
What do you think?
In the UK, music venues who have live and pre-recorded music paid a set fee to cover royalties. As with the USA, the performers have to be licensed. The Performing Rights Society (PRS) collects the fees from venues, radio stations, podcasters (!) etc. and distributes to the artist who wrote the song, in respect of a live performance that someone else performs.
Maybe if a venue has no license at all, the copyright holder can legally seek direct payment, set at their rates rather than the fixed and lower amounts by the authorities? The amounts demanded sound ludicrous and are probably suggested by the money grabbing lawyers!
I think the venue owner should have paid his dues. Brian pays I believe, so why can’t he?
It seems a shame that the royalties were not collected.
Or better yet, sent directly to Valerie Bertinelli and to the Home for Wayward Mudsharks.
Brian,
I’m in a band. A cover band. And in my home town of Ottawa, Canada, 90% of bands are cover bands. I can only imagine what it’s like for the rest of the world.
If the nightclub recorded the bands and made money with the recordings, that’s a different story. It’s copyright infringement since it lessens the commercial value of the original songs — by stealing money away from the creator.
But if it’s not, this falls under “fair use” of the copyright law. And I would even add that, the money the club owner makes is not from covers being played (which probably is the argument, here), since they are providing services, atmosphere, location, etc.
They are paying the bands to perform. Bands should be the ones held liable, not the club owners. And even then, I believe they shouldn’t. Do bookstores pay licenses for people coming into their stores only to sit down at the coffee shop and read books for free? I mean, they provide the location, amenities, and even a good crowd. Or what about a book review in a magazine read in said bookstores? What about music playing over the sound system playing at the music while they’re reading?
I’m not a intellectual property lawyer by any stretch, but as a writer myself, I know enough of the law to know this to be true in most cases.
This is going to turn out like the whole Metallica/Napster fiasco. And as we know, this didn’t stop anything.
Here’s an interesting article by Barenaked Ladies’ frontman speaking out on copyright reform:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/01/barenaked_ladies_fro.html
Admittedly, this situation is different. Or is it? Labels attempt to intimidate their fans. In this case, clubs, bars and restaurants who hire cover bands will suffer the brunt of a decline in clientele when they are forced to hire original acts — unknown, or expensive (if popular), original acts.
The nightclub owner is not the ones who suffers. Again, it’s the fans. And it’s a tragedy.
Nevertheless, this is setting a dangerous precedent and bands will be facing a monumental task if they were to clamp down on every club with cover bands. And it’s not great marketing, either. You hear a song from a cover band at a club, you’ll be tempted to buy the original — or the album where licenses ARE paid to the original creators/labels.
Again, an egg-and-chicken dilemma.
I think licensing has gotten out of hand in this day and age. RIAA going after grandmothers, RIAA shutting down lyric sites (how the hell do you think people find your music, by osmosis?), restaurants technically can’t have so much as a radio playing in public, Now alcatel-lucent is getting 1.5billion from microsoft for mp3 licensing, which they’ve been paying to that german frolulich company. I’m not saying artists shouldn’t get royalties at all, but I think the level of prosecution is getting way too serious. This is music folks, entertainment.. when did it turn into a corporate commodity?
I find it curious that it’s never currently popular bands that try and pull this sort of stuff. If they still had anything to offer they’d being doing gigs, maintaining MySpace sites, and continuing to be creative.
It appears the final manifestation of a “supergroup” and their corporate handlers is the onslaught of legal thugs.
The comments made are all valid. However are we not missing the point? No-one is saying that cover bands or any band can’t play covers. It is just that the venue has to pay a flat rate fee to cover the royalties and my guess is 99.99% do this, but this guy didn’t and is going to pay the price. Therefore the other 99.99% of venues are safe to have anyone play anything, incluing covers, without fear of any writer suing them.
Put yourself in the shoes of a writer, perhaps one not as famous as these guys. Your entire earnings potential rests with fees for playing and royalties from the creativity that you had and others are using. I believe in the UK the royalty fee for someone covering live, from PRS, would be in the region of GBP 4 per play. Not a huge amount.
No-one asks the club owner to pay this GBP 4 for each cover, they set a flat fee that covers everything, to put money back in the pockets of the writers. I think that’s OK.
And as for all the fuss about attacking grandma’s, of course that is stupid. But the fact remains that most people will have in their possession music where the writer earns nothing. I actually think the Canadian Idea is a good one – every i-pod etc comes with a small licence fee that pays money back to all artsists. Then I assume grandma’s are safe in most cases.
Think of it, 100m i-pods with, say, a $20 licence fee – that’s a lot to put back into the writing community.
Why should a writer get paid 30 years after the fact? My uncle isn’t still getting paid for corn he grew last year, let alone 30 years ago. I don’t get royalties for software I’ve written.
IMHO, the copyrite system is way out of whack. They should be protected for maybe 16 years, then it goes into the public domain. Why should Elvis Presley’s grankdkids make money from stuff Elvis did in the 50’s?
And $20 per ipod? Give me a break. The stuff on my ipod I paid for via purchase of the CD. Now you want to charge me for the privilege of listening to it away from my CD player? Reminds me of the 80’s, when they charged a tax on blank tapes. Suddenly I lost all qualms about copying my albums and giving them to friends. Why not, I’ve already paid the tax?
This isn’t really that much news, though it’s usually just ASCAP and/or BMI doing the suing (and usually winning). In this case famous rockers are doing the suing so it seems so much more personal. This club probably just refused to pay fees to BMI and ASCAP that all clubs are obligated to pay, and I imagine that when they got a letter from some legal entity they ignored it. The club is generating revenue by hosting a musical performance and it seems fair that some of that revenue should be shared with the people that hold the copyright on the material that is part of that performance. Most people just pay the fees. It’s like not paying your income tax, you just don’t ignore the letter you get asking to pay what they figure you owe, and especially for a nightclub, they should just chalk it up to a cost of doing business. A lot of people that listen to and play music don’t even think about this, but it really is just business as usual, and posting a link to this article helps to bring it to light.
You got it right Jimbo. It’s a cost of doing business, just like buying beer and lighting up the place. It also keeps the lawyers of your back.
And Jim, if you were the grandson of someone who had written a famous song and the rights had been left to you, and you were not rich, I think you’d have a different attitude. Under your argument, someone could write a song and, after a short period, someone could steal it and release it in their name without you earning a single dollar. Your song might be a sleeper, waiting years before someone picks it up, yet you’d earn zilch. That does not sound fair, whether you are Van Halen or Jonathan Coulton.
And the point on the tax on i-pods is that, whilst it is possible for people to obtain copyrighted material, we have to accept that a LOT of people will do this (not everyone), so it just seems a fairer way to distribute royalties and keep the grandma’s out of jail.
Sorry, Wayne. I agree with Jim on this. Our copyright system is way out of whack. Currently, works are copyrighted for 95 years thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Originally, works were copyrighted for only 7 years with an option to renew for another 7 years.
As far as someone who is the grandson of someone who had written a famous song feeling cheated out of royalties, I say he is not being cheated at all. It wasn’t his to begin with. I don’t earn anything off of the work my grandparents did. What is to stop these people from earning a living on their own? Perhaps they could follow in their grandfather’s footsteps and create something new for a change.
It’s 50 years here in the UK I believe, and Cliff Richard recently failed in a bid to extend to 75 years (he has had a hit in every decade since the 50’s so is seeing his early works fall out of copyright).
I guess my main point is that there must be some protection to a persons creativity and the reason there is a long period is because the works have an enduring nature.
Here’s an interesting link re: licensing for cover songs. It’s a minefield!!
http://www.cleverjoe.com/articles/music_copyright_law.html
About the taxes on I-pod…
Just a few facts from what is happening in France :
You (=we) pay a taxe on every Hard Disk or hardware that can be used to stock datas.
That is to say, as soon as you buy a computer, an mp3-reader, a CD-R or a recordable DVD you pay a taxe for the artists.
When you buy a television or a dvd player with a hard disk, you pay the tax for the artists.
When you create a company or when you rule an office and that you buy a computer for a professional purpose, you pay the tax for the artists…
Fair, isn’t it ?
The strangest point in this bid, beetwen french state and associations of rights owners, is that when you buy a recordable CD you pay that tax in order to indemnify the artists from the potential loss due to piracy… but piracy stays harshly forbidden (you don’t even get the right to make mp3 with cd’s you have legaly bought in a shop. Legaly, to respect french copyright, you have to buy it again in mp3).
So you pay a compensation for something you can not do anyway.
And artists get money from the entire society.
So the question is not “do artists have to be paid” (yes !!!) but “how far will they go to optimize their benefits”. And optimize is, for me, the key word.
Following the french exemple, the answer seems to be : “Very far. Maybe too far”.
For the question about the venues, it sounds to me quite ok that bar-tenders should pay a fee to broadcast music in their pubs.
But the subsidiary question is “how much is a fair price” ?
Remember that the best business is a business based on winning-winning agreements.
Artists should better not forgetting that too long (in my opinion of course 😉 )
And long live your wonderfull podcast Brian !
Greetings from Paris, France
I forgot that little point : this french tax for artists goes from 15 to 20% of the price of the products.
Wich is not negligeable at all, is it ?
i think its hilarious that led zeppelin of all people is trying to bother ANYONE about copyright infringement, given their notorious history of unabashedly STEALING songs and putting their names on them. come on guys.
A good artist borrows..a great artist steals
😉
I can say with near 100% certainty that both Mr.Van Halen and Mr.Page played cover tunes without paying royalties in thier formative years.