American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)
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Identification: Professional performance rights organization
Date: Founded on February 13, 1914
Significance: ASCAP was the first American performance rights organization, tracking the performance of its members’ compositions and collecting licensing fees on their behalf. The organization made it feasible for individual composers to receive the fees they were due by eliminating the need for them to dedicate their own time and resources to administrative overhead. With the advent of radio during the 1920’s, followed later by other mass broadcast and computer technologies, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and other performance rights organizations assumed greater importance.
During the early and mid-nineteenth century, music publishers would often issue their own sheet music, with their own versions of popular tunes, generating huge profits for themselves without paying the original composers. Stricter copyright laws in the latter part of the century led to the creation of musical houses. Each house was responsible for enforcing the copyrights of its member composers, songwriters, and publishers.
A group of Tin Pan Alley musicians determined to disentangle this convoluted system gathered in 1914 and, on February 13, formed the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). The only way to join the society was through sponsorship by a member, and numerous copyright holders did join, so that the group represented most music creators in the United States by the end of the decade. Eventually, ASCAP membership was made open to all music composers, publishers, and songwriters.
The 1920’s brought a new challenge, as radio grew in popularity. Initially, artists performed their music for free on the airwaves, but this novelty soon wore off, leaving a large group of creators in need of support from American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Radio stations were forced to pay copyright licensing fees for both live performances and prerecorded broadcasts.
In 1930, a much smaller performance rights organization, the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC), was formed. Originally, SESAC promoted only European and gospel music. Although it later expanded to include a more diverse membership, SESAC screens its applicants and remains deliberately small in size.
Many radio stations considered American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers fees too high. In 1939, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) was founded to compete with ASCAP by offering lower fees. In 1941, radio stations nationwide organized a boycott of American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers musicians, attempting to demonstrate that American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers did its artists more harm than good by charging high copyright fees. However, the boycott failed utterly, and public demand for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers artists quickly brought a compromise in the dispute.
The three major performance rights organizations, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI, serve the same function for their members, collecting copyright fees from broadcasting groups to distribute to the appropriate copyright holders. ASCAP and BMI both operate on a not-for-profit basis, keeping only administrative fees, while SESAC retains an undisclosed profit from the royalties it collects.
Jessie Bishop Powell
Further Reading
Choate, Pat. Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in the Age of Globalization. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Passman, Donald S. All You Need to Know About the Music Business. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Ryan, John. The Production of Culture in the Music industry: The ASCAP-BMI Controversy. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985.
See also: Apple; Digital recording technology; Radio broadcasting industry.
Copyright law: Copyright Holder Rights
Copyright law: Origins
Book publishing: Twentieth Century