Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) is a performance rights organization in the United States. It collects blanket license fees from businesses that use music, entitling those businesses to play or sync any songs from BMI's repertoire of over 22.4 million musical works. [2] On a quarterly basis, BMI distributes the money to songwriters, composers, and music publishers as royalties to those members whose works have been performed.
In FY 2022, BMI collected $1.573 billion in revenues and distributed $1.471 billion in royalties.[3] BMI's repertoire includes over 1.4 million songwriters and 22.4 million compositions. BMI is the biggest performing rights organization in the United States and is one of the largest such organizations in the world.
In 1961, BMI co-founded the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, which fosters new musical theater writing talent. Notable alumni have included Alan Menken, Maury Yeston, Robert Lopez, Jeanine Tesori, and the songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.[5] In recognition of its contributions to musical theater, the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop has won both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award.[6]
History
In the 1930s, radio was coming to prominence as a source of musical entertainment that threatened to weaken record sales and opportunities for "live" acts. The Great Depression was already draining artist revenues from recordings and live performances. ASCAP, the pre-eminent royalty/licensing agency for more than two decades, required radio stations to subscribe to "blanket" licenses granting ASCAP a fixed percentage of each station's revenue, regardless of how much music the station played from ASCAP's repertoire. In 1939, ASCAP announced a substantial increase in the revenue share licensees would be required to pay. BMI was founded by the National Association of Broadcasters to provide a lower-cost alternative to ASCAP.[7][8] As such, BMI created competition in the field of performing rights, providing an alternative source of licensing for all music users.
The vast majority of U.S. radio stations, and all three radio networks, refused to renew their ASCAP licenses for 1941, choosing to forgo playing ASCAP music entirely and relying on the BMI repertoire. In February 1941, similar to the agreement it had made with ASCAP, the Department of Justice and BMI entered into a consent decree, requiring certain changes to BMI's business model, including giving licensees the option of paying only for the music they actually used instead of buying a blanket license.[9] The U.S. District Court in Milwaukee was chosen by the Justice Department to supervise the decree for both BMI and ASCAP.[10]
Competing against the strongly established ASCAP, BMI sought out artists that ASCAP tended to overlook or ignore. BMI also purchased the rights to numerous catalogs held by independent publishers or whose ASCAP contracts were about to expire. To attract newer writers, BMI proposed to compensate songwriters and publishers on the basis of a fixed fee per performance, as opposed to ASCAP's two-tier system, which discriminated against less-established songwriters. Thus, despite its original motivation regarding radio station royalties and its focus on radio station revenues versus artist revenues, BMI became the first performing rights organization in the United States to represent songwriters of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel (black genres, performers, and writers that ASCAP did not want to represent), country, folk, Latin, and—ultimately—rock and roll. During the 1940s and 1950s, BMI was the primary licensing organization for country artists and R&B artists, while ASCAP centered on more established Pop artists. Also during that time, BMI expanded its repertoire of classical music, and now represents the majority[11] of the members of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters and the winners of 31 Pulitzer Prizes for Music.[12]
BMI's practice of selling only "blanket licenses", rather than licenses for individual songs, led to a major antitrust law dispute between BMI and CBS, that resulted in the 1979 case, Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the prohibition of "price fixing" by the Sherman Act was not strictly literal, and should be interpreted in light of the economic efficiencies an agreement brings.
In July 2017, BMI renewed long-term partnership with C3 Presents, the world's largest music festival producers.[13]
In November 2023, BMI agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by New Mountain Capital.[14]
BMI tracks public performances from among a repertoire of more than 22.4 million musical works. BMI collects blanket fees from users of music such as radio stations, TV stations, and live venues. After deducting its operating expenses off the top, on a quarterly basis BMI distributes the money as Performance Royalties to its member songwriters, composers, and music publishers, according to a royalty calculation formula.[15] BMI has offices in Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Austin, and Washington, D.C..
BMI annually hosts award shows that honor the songwriters, composers and music publishers of the year's most-performed songs in the BMI catalog. BMI Award shows include the BMI Latin Awards, BMI Pop Awards, BMI Film/TV Awards, BMI R&B/Hip-Hop Awards, BMI London Awards, BMI Country Awards, BMI Christian Awards, and the BMI Trailblazers of Gospel Music Awards.[16]
BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop
In 1961, BMI and Lehman Engel founded the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.[17] Engel supervised the workshop and led weekly sessions until his death in 1982, and subsequently Maury Yeston led for the next 23 years. Since its inception, a number of works have been created by members and alumni.[18]
On May 21, 2006, the Drama Desk awarded the BMI Workshop a Special Award "for nurturing, developing and promoting new talent for the musical theater."[19] On September 22, 2006, it was announced that the BMI Workshop was one of the recipients of the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre.[20]
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadcasters, and digital streaming services.
Copyrights can either be licensed or assigned by the owner of the copyright. A copyright collective is a non-governmental body created by copyright law or private agreement which licenses copyrighted works on behalf of the authors and engages in collective rights management. Copyright societies track all the events and venues where copyrighted works are used and ensure that the copyright holders listed with the society are remunerated for such usage. The copyright society publishes its own tariff scheme on its websites and collects a nominal administrative fee on every transaction.
A performance rights organisation (PRO), also known as a performing rights society, provides intermediary functions, particularly collection of royalties, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly in locations such as shopping and dining venues. Legal consumer purchase of works, such as buying CDs from a music store, confer private performance rights. PROs usually only collect royalties when use of a work is incidental to an organisation's purpose. Royalties for works essential to an organisation's purpose, such as theaters and radio, are usually negotiated directly with the rights holder. The interest of the organisations varies: many have the sole focus of musical works, while others may also encompass works and authors for audiovisual, drama, literature, or the visual arts.
Maury Yeston is an American composer, lyricist and music theorist.
Edward "Ed" Kleban was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist. Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrence McNally.
Music licensing is the licensed use of copyrighted music. Music licensing is intended to ensure that the owners of copyrights on musical works are compensated for certain uses of their work. A purchaser has limited rights to use the work without a separate agreement.
A. Lehman Engel was an American composer and conductor of Broadway musicals, television and film.
A Class Act is a quasi-autobiographical musical loosely based on the life of composer-lyricist Edward Kleban, who died at the age of 48 in 1987. Featuring a book by Linda Kline and Lonny Price along with music and lyrics by Kleban himself, the musical uses flashbacks and the device of time running backwards to retrace the high and low points of the composer's personal and professional life.
Production music is recorded music that can be licensed to customers for use in film, television, radio and other media. Often, the music is produced and owned by production music libraries.
Zina Goldrich is an American composer known for her work in musical theatre in collaboration with the lyricist Marcy Heisler. Her best-known works as composer include "Ever After The Musical", "Taylor The Latte Boy" and "Alto's Lament".
Kim Oler is an American television and theatrical composer. He is a member of the BMI and Dramatists Guild.
Neil Bartram is a musical theatre composer/lyricist based in New York. Bartram is the composer and lyricist of Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Theory of Relativity and Broadway's The Story of My Life with book writer Brian Hill.
Mark Hollmann is an American composer and lyricist.
Michael Kooman is an Emmy nominated composer writing for the stage and screen. His television work includes songs on the Disney Junior animated series, Vampirina and the Netflix series Ridley Jones.* He is most known for his musical Romantics Anonymous, which premiered in 2017 at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. He is half of the writing team of Kooman and Dimond.
Music Reports provides music rights licensing, administration, royalty accounting, and software development and hosting. Music Reports operates the largest registry of worldwide music rights and related business information.
The ASCAP boycott was a 1941 boycott of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) by radio broadcasters, due to license fees. From another perspective, it was a boycott of radio broadcasters by ASCAP, "concerned about the unlicensed radio broadcast of its members' material ..."
United States v. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) et al., No. 09-0539, 2010 WL 3749292, was a United States Court of Appeals case involving copyright liability for third-party vendors that provide online music download services. In particular, the Second Circuit ruled that music downloads do not constitute public performances, upholding the district court's decision and consequently preventing ASCAP from claiming higher royalty fees from Yahoo! and RealNetworks for downloaded music. However, the Second Circuit disagreed with the district court's method of fee assessment and remanded the case for further proceedings. ASCAP appealed the decision and requested a writ of certiorari for judicial review in the Supreme Court.
Benjamin Velez is an American composer and lyricist.
Ottalie Mark was an American musicologist, copyright consultant, composer, and music editor.
Keith Dale Gordon, is an American lyricist and composer of musical theater, commercial jingles, and award shows. He is known primarily for his 2006 musical Saint Heaven which Gordon co-wrote with Martin Casella. Also for his musical adaptation of Camille DeAngelis' 2007 novel Mary Modern and lyrical setting of Karel Jaromir Erben's poem The Wedding Night.
↑ The dispute between ASCAP and the radio industry is the subject of major articles in every issue of Broadcasting from mid-1939 through early 1941. The text of the consent decree is published in the February 3, 1941, issue, beginning on page 22.
↑ "Milwaukee Preferred: Waters Preference for Damm Led to Selection". Broadcasting. 20 (11): 40. March 24, 1941.
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