About 20 years ago, Act 3 Theatres (a Pacific Northwest chain) got into a spat with ASCAP about not only the intermission music played in the auditoriums, but also in the lobby. ACT 3 told ASCAP told go fuck themselves. ACT 3 then hired local bands to write and perform non-copyrighted and non-ASCAP/BMI music. They then made hundreds of CDs and sent them out to all their theaters with instructions that only those CDs were to be played in the theaters. This was a win for the theaters: no ASCAP/BMI troubles and local bands were hired and paid directly for their work.

Then examine all the stuff Daft Punk sampled and it gets all inception-y, although they usually aren't blatantly abusing hits that people will recognize instantaneously. If you were ever interested in how it is done:

this is a particularly impressive remake in Ableton:

I'm sure there's a lot of practicing ahead of time, but that's pretty impressive. I've done a fair amount of video editing and the content in those two vids took a lot of time to go through.

No Sir.. Jukebox only covers the music that is paid for play from the jukebox. When the jukebox isn't playing the license stops.

JJ

Just read this now and this is all said in kind.

I hear what your saying, but the difference is, those entities you spoke of need to pay for the right to use the music because they're directly profiting/making money off of those songs specifically and another company didn't already pay that fee for them. Stern has paid those fees up front for us.

To clarify, Stern pays a licensing fee to the music industry. They are now paid in full and Stern has the right to sell that machine with it's music to the next person who (by default) buys into the license as well. The music in the machine is ours to use however we want, whether it's at our home, bar, arcade or wherever. Making money or not.

"WE" (you, me, an operator, whomever) have bought into the license by paying Stern back the licensing fees because Stern simply added that fee into the cost of each machine. It should not matter who buys the machine and what they do with it. It's licensed within the game and we've all paid for said license. It's not like you're going to take a pinball machine out and use only the music on it to crank out DJ entertainment. That's not it's function. The music is a game enhancement that plays in the back round (as you said), it's not the main form of entertainment.

As far as CD's go (which is comparing apples to oranges here), if I buy a CD can I then go use it to DJ with or copy to sell to someone else to make a profit off of? Absolutely not. Laws are written against that and I never have. BUT, I can take my CD I paid for, copy it to my computer and then to my I-pod and listen to it on any device I choose because the music on it is now mine.

DJ's have DJ specific sites they can buy music from and the right to use that music for their business is included in the price of the songs they buy because they are going to profit from it.

Anyway, what's next from ASCAP...if you play CD's you bought at a party in your home, you get fined, jailed or both? Bet they'd love to do that too.

ASCAP=Legalized Organized Crime. These guys never cease to amaze me. They just can't get enough of raping bar owners and operators.

The CDs shouldn't be part of this argument. We're talking about a product MADE for public/commercial usage.

Well, it would suck to be the drummer(bassplayer), and help create the beat, changes, (lyrics) and expression of a song. Only to get fuc$ed by a greedy guitar player that wrote (most) the words, and now thinks he is entitled to everything.
If you ever get a band together, it's a band. Drummers are songwriters too.

Don't tell Neil Peart that. It'll go to his head!

They did go after the girl scouts for singing songs around the campfire. I'm not kidding.

ASS-CAP

Too late. lol (old habit, can't resist a shot at Rush d

So I talked to the owner at my primary location today (pizza parlor). He's discussed his run ins with the ASCAP folks with me before and it usually included foul language. I gave him the heads up that ASCAP may come in asking about AC/DC. He said no prob. He now pays about $340 a year for a site license (my term). This does not include the internet jukebox fees, which are covered by another operator.

As was explained to him, it covers all his TV's and any karaoke nights he chooses to have. When negotiating with them, he asked if he would still have to pay if he never turned on MTV and only kept the TV's on CNN. They said yes, because intros to shows and commercials often have music. That's how far down they drill. If you hear music coming out of anything in there, they want their fee.

It looks to me that they are currently going after businesses where they currently aren't collecting any money. I've always paid for my music and I'm a huge supporter of musicians. Last concert was the last Bridge School benefit and I paid for my ticket. So I want the musicians to get paid. The problem here looks to be the folks going for the fees. They obviously get commissions. Their tactics are worse than used car salesmen. That needs to be changed. Next time I go to my bar location, I'll talk to the owner there. They only play pandora music there. He's also a guitar player and music store owner, so it will be interesting to hear his thoughts and find out how much they soak him for.

So what happens if I'm driving down the street, through town etc, with music blasting in my car? (I have quite the loud system)

Sounds like that would be a problem too. Sounds like these people are to the point of ridiculous.

Tim

While doing our ASCAP research this one was especially entertaining to us ...

http://www.filmmusicmag.com/?p=3995

That judge handed them their ass. Nice.

You forgot to add" and harass the shit out of A/V companies"....had one walk in my office one day, asking if we offered CD players to our Clients ( this was several years back when you could one). I said " none of your business, but of course we offer them". He then professed that " it was like I was selling a gun, without bullets" ...never forget that line...told him to get the fuck out of my office.

They do impose fines, and win ALOT of the time......strong arming, for sure.....

Is that why the production seemed to end early. I had purchased one to see how it would do, then tried to order two more but could not as the music controversy had started.

It actually wasn't. We paid the ASCAP ransom and were free and clear on that.

Our license with Activision expired and when we started talks to extend the agreement the financials just didn't make sense to us.

LOL, that's cute.

-

Look at bands with strong drummers like Motley Crue:

http://www.allmusic.com/album/too-fast-for-love-mw0000191089

See any songs written by Lee? Nope.

Looks like all the songs were written by Sixx, with some help from Neil and Grey.

Smart on Sixx when the ASCAP checks roll in.

I gave you a thumbs up just for using the word cacophany!

This is cute. Look at bands with actual strong drummers like Rush, Tool, and Led Zeppelin. Are they on the list as writers? You bet your ass they are.

There are OBVIOUSLY bands where the drummer writes songs, so I'm not sure what your point is.

when a song is playing on a pinball machine it also has other noises overlapping it and the song does not play in its entirety. in other words, a bds system would not detect the song like it does on the radio as long as its played at the correct pitch speed. when i mix on the radio i watch the bds system try to detect songs i mix and it goes haywire bcuz i pitch up or down tracks and i don't play the song in full, and of course its mixed with other tracks...lol.
when i mix songs used on ESPN i have to be very specific and log each track, take pictures of record lables, even log bits and pieces. i also use white label tracks that have no affiliation with ascap or bmi so too bad for them!

In the case of Neil, he actually writes the lyrics, I believe.

Evert now and then, drummers are important.

Great game. It pretty much taught me the basics of how to play the drums.

This is my take. Clyde Stubblefield gets no royalties for this cut. Not cool. The last 15 seconds is the most recognizable drum break ever.

When it comes to the Crue, Sixx has most of the songwriting credits (both music and lyrics). Tommy Lee has some music credits, as does Mars. Vince Neil may have a lyric credit or two, I am not sure. He's mostly a glorified Karaoke singer.

As far as ASCAP is concerned, they should be vigilant about getting for the musicians all that they're entitled to. People have been using the internet to steal music for 15 years. It's killing the music business. No one wants to release a record anymore and lose money. How many of you that complain about having to pay ASCAP in your place of business also speak out against illegal duplication?

Put 5 or 6 pinball machines next to each other all playing their stuff over the top of each other and anyone across the room will NOT be able to make out anything that is playing. When a jukebox is playing there is one jukebox playing and the music IS the entertainment and clearly audible to all those around. One forensic witness can play the sound of a barcade in operation and the ASCAP case melts in a screaming heap. This is such bullshit and will never fly.

Question-Does the law of double taxation come into play? For example if Stern already payed a license or royalty fee to AC/DC to manufacturer and use it's likeness, will an op still need to pay an additional fee that goes to the band if entertaining people on a location. You would think the band signed off on that when the license was sold to make commercial machines built for public use.

Other question-What about Pandora or XM Satellite(fee based) radio being used in a bar for entertainment. Does the operator still have to pay ASCAP?

When you live and breathe this stuff, you start to learn all the little tricks for getting sounds and it sorta sucks the magic out of it and it becomes easy to do this stuff. I could recreate the majority of stuff out there pretty accurately and fairly quickly if asked, I have for fun just to see If I could before. Most of what I write is electronic, and computers really have been a great tool but also a lot of the experimental creative side of things in writing don't happen in a DAW. You become complacent with the ease of being able to do certain things and you get used to certain plug-ins and settings and you just go into autopilot. I've recently been forcing myself to not use my DAW, or I only use it for midi sequencing in conjunction with my APC40 for sequence selection going out to my hardware. I picked up the Korg Volcas recently and have been having a lot of fun playing around with them along with my other real hardware and just fx pedal loops for manipulation, it completely changes the writing dynamic when you are forced to play with stuff on the fly, and that is when the creative accidents happen. I remember some of the earlier samplers I owned and how much I loved them, despite how much of a pain in the ass they were to work with (physically dialing in and creating loop points). I think part of it was that you knew if you were going to import a sample into it, it better be good. In Ableton, you just browse to a sample folder you have and can instantly audition and play with 1000's of samples. You just throw something in place and move on without thinking about it as much.

Reminds me of

9d0143aef0bc003d628fc228453f747d.jpg

Just because a band member doesn't help write the lyrics, doesn't mean they didn't help write the song. And as a "band", all members should be paid accordingly.
Sure, there are OBVIOUSLY situations where one person is the core of the whole thing, and deserves all funds, but just dismissing all bass players and drummers as you did in your original statement is not cool.
The mighty Steve Harris does a lil' writing for Maiden.
Also, Motley wouldn't be the same band without Lee, he deserves his cut too.
Sixx would most likely agree.

There are some bands where 1/2 people pretty much tell the other members what notes to play, and others where the whole band participates in the songwriting process, so it really depends who is the driving force.

Most recognizable drum break ever

The Winstons = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break

Are there any mixing programs that you can use on a Mac to remix music pulled from CDs?

She wouldn't be entitled to any future payments due to the release she would have signed. Anyone who was in the games either visually or audio had to sign releases giving up any claim on them in exchange for whatever they were paid for their work. I even had to sign this as an employee of the company when they put me as hidden characters in some of the video games we made.

The music in the Pinball machines was hardcoded from the factory into the game. A license was paid to put the music into a machine whose sole purpose is to be a coin-op machine on location. Seems pretty cut and dry to me that the license has already been paid for it to be used on coin play on location. Not sure about the newer internet juke boxes, but earlier CD and record jukeboxes were sold with no music inside, you had to add that after the purchase.

yup... you can do it in garage band, although there's another piece of software that my wife uses (damned if i remember the name, all i remember is that it was expensive) to muck around...

Thanks

Ableton is for Mac as well. Cycling '74's MaxMSP is also a very fun and creative program. And logic is probably the most commonly used DAW for Mac users. I use abelton and Sonar on Pc pretty exclusively. I also play round with MAX & CHUCK programming language and occasionally still use Fruityloops. When you say remix though, do you mean like mashups, or sampling and what was done in those videos I linked?

Yes...

I'm waiting on the arrival of a PinSound and I'm planning on changing the music in my Johnny M.

I'd like to take some techno/drum tracks from various bands/DJs and "mashup" and loop them.

I've never done anything like that before...so ideally I'll be using a fairly easy/user friendly program that will allow me to import and export tracks.

What do you suggest?

At some point you still need to get into an audio editor and create your loops. Audacity is a free audio editor that will allow you to pull in waveforms and crop and create loopable segments. From there you could easily import these loops into a multitude of other programs to loops them. The easiest by far to learn and use is sony ACID which allows you to simply import loop-ready audio files right into a timeline and draw how ever many bars you want something to repeat in different tracks. But it could be done in ableton or logic as well, they have much steeper learning curves and assume you have prior knowledge of how audio gear works and is chained physically.

I'm thinking you don't know how the music business actually works:

Lee gets his cut from album sales, merch, touring, appearances....."band stuff".

-

The writer of the lyrics and melody is different altogether.

The writer is paid when his music is re-recorded by other bands, melody is used in elevators, melody is used in TV commercials, lyrics are used in spoken word poetry or even sheet music.....

Yeah, for me working with turntables, efx units and an MPC is so much more gratifying than the DAW. Limits tend to lead to creative workarounds and results you'd never otherwise stumble on. Plus the old hardware all has its cool little idiosyncrasies.

I still prefer funky drummer. Both are played out though. Not sure I'd ever use em personally.

Viewed this post this morning, didn't think too much about it. Just went to my video manager on YouTube and the video gameplay of my ACDC has been flagged/ claimed by SME (Sony Music Entertainment)

AC/DC - T.N.T. was the song in question. What BS

Back on topic though.... rabble* rabble* rabble* ascap!

WOW... Speechless

I prefer kitty drummer.

Oh my god! That cat is at least as good as Steve Weibe!