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Oh, this topic just keeps getting better and better, while remaing COMPLETELY OT for this list: http://www.starpolish.com/news/article.asp?id=44 See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me - Pay Me Dave Marsh — Monday, March 05, 2001 Pete Townshend keeps a diary on his website and the most fascinating passage so far concerns downloading MP3 files with his son, Joseph, who was appalled that they were "stealing." Dad didn't think so, and the fact that such a prominent member of rock's ancient regime supports file sharing has had many readers agog. Townshend's first reason for not giving a damn whether his fans get access to his music for free is that he doesn't often get paid for it. Among other things, he comments, "during the 1989 tour, when we paid a huge sum of money to BMI for the right to perform songs I had written, they eventually paid me (after a lot of complaining from my manager) a tiny portion of that sum, excusing themselves because their main payout area that year was Nashville." BMI is a performance rights organization (PRO), meaning it collects money from broadcasters and "restaurants, nightclubs, bowling alleys, aerobics centers, retail establishments" (to quote from its own literature). Lately, it has been dunning assisted living homes for seniors, on the grounds that these are commercial businesses in which music is sometimes played. BMI "only" wants $2.25 a bed per year from these places, which it pretends will come out of the pockets of the owners with no effect on the tenants. What's truly stupefying about this - unless you're used to the machinations of the music world - is that BMI's own literature says flatly, "Payment to writers and publishers is based primarily on broadcast performances. Keeping track of all performances of music in other areas...is impossible. With over 10,000 broadcasting stations in the United States, however, it is safe to assume that what is being played on the commercial airwaves reflects what is being played by other music users." In short, the seniors listening to "Bicycle Built for Two," or "Ebb Tide," or even the Five Satins' "In the Still of the Night," will actually be paying the songwriters for Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and Matchbox 20. BMI's rationale would be more widely damned if the public understood that this nonprofit corporation is owned by commercial broadcasters who formed it when ASCAP resisted music broadcasting in the early 1940s. BMI helped the broadcasters cut their music licensing fees by about 25 percent - ASCAP's share got cut in half. Because BMI needed writers, it opened its door to black and country writers who had been kept out of ASCAP by racism and snobbery, and this relationship to "roots music" and the building tidal wave of rock and soul has always been celebrated. The sweetheart deal is ignored. But BMI's allegiance has always been divided. For instance, BMI has been a prime financial backer of the most anti-music politician in America, Albert Gore. Gore has a resounding devotion to the interests of broadcasters, many of whom became billionaires as a result of the "deregulation" Gore sponsored in the Clinton years. The aggression of BMI is quite remarkable. It demands money from its members playing their own songs in venues that have already paid for music licenses (there are no prominent venues that don't). It even attempts to collect from nonmembers who have titles that are the same as BMI titles. Yet even an artist as famous as Townshend finds its accounting practices overtly shortchange him. Even a deaf, dumb and blind kid would recognize that smell as rotten.