ASCAP VERSUS BMI

Performance and Payment

By the 1940s, years of dispute had divided broadcasters and American songwriters. At the heart of their controversy was compensation for music played over the radio. Most radio broadcasts were live, and the musicians and composers were paid for a single performance, but to musicians and composers payment for a single performance alone did not seem fair when that one performance was being received by millions of listeners. Had those millions been packed into one concert hall, the musicians's share of the receipts would presumably have been huge. Broadcasters argued that it was impossible to pay licensing fees based on how many listeners tuned in, because no one knew what that number was. Besides, it was the technology of radio that made such enormous audiences possible. From the broadcasters' standpoint, it was enough to pay the musician and the songwriter for the single performance. In the 1930s, broadcasters, organized into the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), compromised with composers and songwriters, who had been organized since 1914 into the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Radio stations paid ASCAP a variable royalty of between 3 and 5 percent of the station's gross revenue from advertising sales. This compromise satisfied no one. Broadcasters turned to drama, news, and special events to avoid paying the songwriters, and in 1937 ASCAP suggested they would demand greater royalties when the current contract between musicians and broadcasters expired in 1940.

Records

Complicating the argument between ASCAP and NAB was the increasing use by radio stations of recorded music. Recording technology was still imperfect, and fidelity was low, but stations nonetheless began to play records, introduced by a studio announcer known as a disc jockey. Once again the problem of compensating the musicians and composers on the records presented itself. Before 1940 many musicians, such as Bing Crosby or Fred Waring, sold records stamped with "NOT LICENSED FOR RADIO BROADCAST." In 1940, however, the Supreme Court ruled that radio stations, having purchased the record, could play it. By 1941 disc-jockey programs such as WNEW's Make Believe Ballroom were restructuring the nature of music broadcasts. Far cheaper for a broadcaster than live performances, disc jockeys and recorded music were taking over the airwaves.

RADIO REPORTS THE DEATH OF
ROOSEVELT

Following many wartime improvements in the reporting of news by radio, American broadcasting succeeded in uniting the nation as never before on 12 April 1945, the day President Franklin Roosevelt died. First reports in the early evening were confused, sometimes erroneously reporting the deaths of other public figures. By late that night, however, radio listeners coast-to-coast were united in national mourning over the president's passing. Radios broadcast repeated summaries of FDR's career, prospects for the war without his leadership, and somber music. The networks and some local stations suspended advertising from the day of FDR's death until his burial in Hyde Park four days later. CBS reporter Arthur Godfrey, describing Roosevelt's funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, broke down in tears and had to turn the broadcast over to a studio announcer. Much of the nation shared his sentiments. Radio provided an unprecedented outlet for the nation's collective grief—just as, four months later, radio became the mechanism for the national celebration of the end of the war.

Boycott and BMI

ASCAP, as well as the American Federation of Musicians, responded to these developments by boycotting the airwaves. Lacking a new royalty contract with increased rates, ASCAP pulled music it licensed from the air in 1941. In 1942 the American Federation of Musicians followed suit. By a unanimous vote at its annual convention, these musicians agreed to halt the making of new recordings. Radio was left with meager fare: recordings of unlicensed songs such as Stephen Foster's "Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair." But broadcasters were not without resources. They had organized their own royalty agency, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), in 1939. The upstart BMI quickly became a magnet for regional musicians, such as rhythm and blues or country and western artists, who were traditionally neglected by the New York-based ASCAP. ASCAP's boycott was broken, and they settled for a less advantageous royalty rate than they had originally earned. In 1943 and 1944 record companies compromised with the American Federation of Musicians and created a welfare fund to facilitate payments to musicians. The record industry returned to full production, now for the new disc jockey-dominated broadcast industry. Although ASCAP and BMI received equal royalty rates from broadcasters, musicians could now choose which of the two agencies collected royalty payments, a situation unacceptable to ASCAP. In the 1950s and 1960s ASCAP would initiate a series of unsuccessful lawsuits to recover the position they lost during the boycott of 1941.

Sources:

Steve Chappie and Reebee Garofalo, Rock 'n' Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977);

John Ryan, The Production of Culture in the Music Industry: The ASCAP-BMI Controversy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985).