Changes to ASCAP Payments

[Brock1]

Does anyone have detailed information on the changes ASCAP made to their royalty structure a while back? It seemed to just slip under the radar. They announced they were making royalties more equitable be paying the same rate for instrumentals as for songs with vocals...but they didn't say if they were raising the payout for instrumentals to match that of songs with vocals, lowering the rate for songs with vox to the level of instrumentals, or meeting in the middle.

The rumor is they lowered the payout of songs with vox to match instrumentals. So, while technically equitable, the big question remains: What happened to the gazillions of dollars they just "saved" by not having to make those payouts for songs with vox??

Anyone have any info? I scoured the internet but couldn't find much. One would think if that was the case, a lot of ASCAP members who have songs with vox on tv would switch to BMI. But I haven't really heard of anyone doing that. I also haven't heard of BMI adopting the same royalty structure.

It would be great if they were a bit more transparent about such changes.

Mike

[andygabrys]

think that was ASCAP lowering the rate for BV cues to the same as BI cues.

that was about 3 or 4 years back now. was that the incident you are thinking of?

[Brock1]

Hi Andy,

Yeah, that might be it. Was it really that long ago? Yikes!

So it was for BV vs BI? I never caught that part of it. The information that was available was pretty vague. So presumably feature presentations still pay at their former rate? It's just BV songs that have been "equalized"?

Mike
www.soundcloud.com/mikewestbrock
www.mikewestbrock.com

[andygabrys]

check it out Mike:

http://forums.taxi.com/topic62085.html

lotsa heated discussion for light reading.