ASCAP said in the lawsuit that it made more than 50 attempts to contact HonkyTonk Saloon since January 2017 to offer the venue an
ASCAP license, including by mail, email, phone and in person.
Currently, a rate court in New York sets the royalties that
ASCAP and BMI, which represent artists and music publishers, are paid.
"We are particularly supportive of a provision in this legislation that ensures an enhanced congressional review of any DOJ changes to the
ASCAP and BMI consent decrees.
ASCAP became a locus of market power for the selling of music performance rights vis-a-vis the broadcasters and other distributors of the music by becoming the common agent for thousands of otherwise-competing composers/songwriters and music publishers.
"We have been haunted relentlessly by SESAC and
ASCAP," the Executive Vice President of one mid-sized apartment owner/manager based in the Southeast says.
Her Grammy-award winning hit Thinking Out Loud, performed by Ed Sheeran on his album X, won the
Ascap Song of the Year and the
Ascap Top Digital Song.
Now in its 28th year, the workshop is produced by Mike Todd,
ASCAP's senior director for film and TV, and overseen by Emmy-winning composer Richard Beilis, author of the standard film-music text "The Emerging Film Composer."
By this time, although
ASCAP expressed its "support [for] the concept of a performance right in sound recordings," it remained concerned that record companies would benefit from the new rights "on the backs of the songwriters and music publishers who created and own the underlying songs without which the sound recordings would not exist at all." (35) Specifically,
ASCAP feared that the new sound-recording royalties would be subtracted from existing composition fees.
Vincent Candilora, head of licensing at
ASCAP confirmed this: "We don't go away.
The company said Tuesday it has signed new multiyear licensing agreements with
ASCAP and BMI, which control the licenses to more than 20 million musical works.
Schultz was a perennial recipient of
ASCAP Standard Music Awards and was awarded a grant from the Arts International Fund for a performance of his music at ICMC Glasgow 1990 in Scotland.