Apparently films pay for/ask permission to use music.
This is their way of getting paid.

It all seems a bit suspect to me, however Hoyts pay them so I don't see how a wee guy like myself can stand up to them.
 

The only reason why a US theatre would want to purchase an ASCAP license would be if they wanted to play ASCAP-labelled non-sync music. Someone who has gone through the process will probably comment here, but I believe that they have flat-rate fees based on the size of the theatre.
 

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A KIWI eats,roots & Leaves.
 

they also charge hairdressers ,shops, factories etc a fee for playing the radio in their salons,also copyright music "on hold" .
 

It sounds to me like the APRA is 'double dipping' as one poster put it.
 

There is a current bill before congress,CRS-5,which is designed to change the way ASCAP licensing works. In that bill it mentions the litigation that stopped ASCAP from collecting from theatres for film soundtracks. I quote: "When ASCAP sought to license motion picture theater exhibitors, the exhibitors brought a successful antitrust action. District courts in ALDEN-ROCHELLE, Inc. v. ASCAP and M.WITMARK & SONS v. JENSEN held the blanket license violated the restraint of trade provisions of the antitrust laws and required ASCAP to grant "source" licenses to motion picture producers, which would extend to performances in motion picture theaters."

This of course only applies to the United States, but it is hard to believe that the same would not have resulted long before this in the rest of the civilized world.
 

I can understand the principle of a PRS licence for things like juke boxes and non-sync in cinemas, because an exclusive service is being delivered to those premises, i.e. you are paying for the right to play specific recordings on specific premises at a specific time, which cannot be heard by anyone unless they are on those premises at that time. But a free-to-air broadcast can legally be heard by anyone, anywhere, and the right to make copyright material available in this way has already been paid for by the broadcaster.

The music rights issue must be a nightmare when distributing a film in many different countries, with potentially a different person or organisation controlling the copyright to each piece of music in each country...

When I went portable I was advised that the licence had to be changed to a traveling exhibitor licence, in my case it worked out cheaper as the estimated audiance was less than in a fixed cinema.

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KALEE FOREVER. CARBON ARC, THE ONLY LIGHT FOR THE STARS!
ALL PARTS FOR VICTOR AND KALART VICTOR 16MM PROJECTORS.SERVICE TO 35 AND 16MM PROJECTION EQUIPMENT.
35MM sprockets made to order.
 

Per
 

quote:

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PRS, The Performing Rights Society, in the UK charge us an annual fee for the use of copyright music in the theatres and throughout the rest of the museum.

they also charge hairdressers ,shops, factories etc a fee for playing the radio in their salons,also copyright music "on hold".

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The PRS licence only covers film soundtracks. PPL, The Public Performing Licence, charge the annual fee for the use of copyright music elsewhere to the public including non-sync in theatres.

Before I closed my cinema, I was hounded twice by a third body, VPL, The Video Performing Licence, for a video music licence.

You could that say that UK cinemas are well and truly being ripped off.

This difference in law outside the US seems to be because no one has yet sood up to them (Wimps)
 

APRA actually want 0.55% of 60% of your gross door admissions.
I have just paid mine and I am looking at the account and how they calculate it.
They are a fairly intractable group to deal with as I had a few problems with incorrect names and addresses on our first few accounts and I had to become quite "cranky" with them before they managed to get off their backsides and ammend our details.
(Was getting snaky letters from them demanding payment when they had sent Invoices to wrong addresses etc)

They also have a very strange way of calculating the amounts as they do it in two chunks... possibly so to relieve the burden of the bill for bigger sites.
Most cinemas get two bills a year in Australia from APRA.

In our case running just 5 months I find it a bit tiresome to have to submit figures for for a period when we are not on screen.
I tried to get them to just give me one bill annually.... ha ha pigs might fly!

I reluctantly pay up as I consider that it is an IMPOST as we have no control over what music is supplied via the soundtrack but agree that we should pay to provide Non Sync music from CD's/tapes etc.
How do they "divvy" the spoils up if they have no idea who played what at what cinema... all a bit "nebulous" to me and the sceptic in me wonders IF the music makers actually EVER get any of this money collected.
What about if we just used a FM station for Non Sync and just played that???
Would APRA be double dipping if they tried to slug us for fees then as the FM station has to dutifully log EVERY track they play every day and submit details to most likely APRA to pay the copyright fee.
A mate of mine does a Jazz segment on a local FM station for a hour or so each week and it drives him crazy just doing all the paperwork for copyright purposes.
I guess that this is one of those little crosses we have to bear just running a small business as it seems that every time you turn about some other group has their hands in your back pocket.
 

In most countries outside the United States, motion picture theaters are required to pay performance royalties for music used in theatrically distributed films. These fees are collected by the local performing-rights society in each country (PRS in England, GEMA in Germany, JASRAC in Japan, SACEM in France, SOCAN in Canada, APRA in Australia, BUMA in the Netherlands, etc.) which, in turn, distribute royalties to the writers and publishers of music contained in the films distributed in their territories. The foreign societies will remit the writer's share of such monies directly to the performing rights society that a writer is a member of (i.e. ASCAP in the U.S.), which will then pay these theatrical performance royalties as a foreign distribution. In simple language, what this means is that, if you managed to get a song in a movie that is released outside the U.S., you'll get checks from your performing rights society that they in turn have received from the foreign performing rights organizations that collected the money for you in the first place. In contrast to the handling of writer royalties, the music publisher normally allows its representative in each foreign territory to directly collect its publisher royalty share in the local country.

Theater license fees vary by country and are usually a percentage of the theater's box office receipts. Because of the worldwide appeal of many motion pictures -- Titanic and Star Wars, to cite a couple of obvious examples -- it's not unusual for successful films to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in theatrical performance royalties

So... it's on the side of APRA.
 

Even though in the US the royalty companies haven't yet adopted this absurd concept -- "pay for music used in the film" -- although I can just imagine the ASCAP guy drooling at the thought of such an arrangement -- here in the states ASCAP & BMI still try to extract every loose penny that might be rattling around in anyone's pocket. They want venues to pay a licensing fee (which we do) that is a blanket fee for the entire year; it allows us to play any music that they represent either prerecorded non-sync or performed by artists at our live shows. The fee is based on the number of seats and the number of performances we put on average in a year. Yet these royalty companies also hound the artists who perform music in our theatres to also pay a licensing fee for the very same music that we already paid for by virtue of our fee. A fee for the same piece of music is being collected twice.

They wanted to do the same with radio stations. The stations pay ASCAP and BMI royalties, then the royalty companies want to force the restaurant owner who plays a radio in his establishment to pay a royalty fee also. Again, the royalty companies are collecting twice. Or would like too -- I think a restaurant association successfully fought that battle and won.

This is nothing less than extortion and should be fought in court any place the royalty companies try to pull that kind of a shakedown; in the case of performers in venues like ours, they still are being harassed, so far to my knowledge -- the scam continues. It certainly would make a good class action suit for some aggressive law firm who wanted to fight it. The practice harms both the venue and the performer.

Frank