The threatening letters started arriving in early 2009, a few months after Jim Whitney opened J Dubs Coffee, a tiny storefront coffee shop in a Manchester, N.H., strip mall. Fifteen came over a few months, right around the time Anthony Demings, owner of the Brooklyn Coffee and Tea House in Providence, was receiving his own string of letters, and Lorraine Carboni, proprietor of Somethin’s Brewin’ Book Cafe in Lakeville, began getting calls and then lunch hour visits from a brusque man.
“I was blown away by his demeanor,’’ Carboni said. “He was rude to my staff. He was adamant about getting information. They were threatening me with lawsuits. So I did what I had to do, and ended my music program.’’
Across New England, church coffeehouses, library cafes, and eateries that pass the hat to pay local musicians or open their doors to casual jam sessions are experiencing a crackdown by performance rights organizations, or PROs, which collect royalties for songwriters.
Copyright law requires that any venue where music is performed publicly, from cheerleading competitions and mortuaries to nightclubs and stadiums, have a performance license. Recorded music is subject to license fees as well. The three US-based PROs — ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC — collect the fees and distribute them to their members.
With the music industry in steep decline, PROs are ramping up their pursuit of the little guys, who acknowledge that songwriters are entitled to compensation but are angry and frustrated at what they see as unfair targeting of small businesses and nonprofits that make no money from the music they present.
Among them is Magret Gudmundsson, who until recently hosted a monthly acoustic open mike in her Middleborough cafe, Coffee Milano. “I like having it here, but we’re not making any money from it and they wanted $332 a year,’’ Gudmundsson said. “The town really needs something like this. They ruined it.’’
Performance license fees are calculated based on a variety of factors: a venue size and seating capacity, the number of musicians who perform there, and the number of live performances per week, among others. The average fee for a small coffeehouse would be $200 to $400. But owners could be required to buy licenses from all three PROs.
The PROs have been criticized for years for their aggressive stance; in the mid-1990s ASCAP bowed to public outcry after attempting to collect licensing fees from the Girl Scouts for singing campfire songs. (They now charge the scouts a symbolic $1 a year.) But Vincent Candilora, ASCAP’s senior vice president for licensing, has no sympathy for Gudmundsson and her ilk.
“They’re selling coffee for four dollars and they can’t afford a dollar a day for music? If they don’t think it’s worth it, that’s their choice,’’ Candilora said. “But I have to say that most people recognize that music is a value to their business. Every now and then we run into people that think, ‘I’m just a small little bar; they’re not going to sue me,’ and that’s a mistake. Frankly, once you’re on our radar we can’t let you go.’’
“I was blown away by his demeanor,’’ Carboni said. “He was rude to my staff. He was adamant about getting information. They were threatening me with lawsuits. So I did what I had to do, and ended my music program.’’
Across New England, church coffeehouses, library cafes, and eateries that pass the hat to pay local musicians or open their doors to casual jam sessions are experiencing a crackdown by performance rights organizations, or PROs, which collect royalties for songwriters.
Copyright law requires that any venue where music is performed publicly, from cheerleading competitions and mortuaries to nightclubs and stadiums, have a performance license. Recorded music is subject to license fees as well. The three US-based PROs — ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC — collect the fees and distribute them to their members.
With the music industry in steep decline, PROs are ramping up their pursuit of the little guys, who acknowledge that songwriters are entitled to compensation but are angry and frustrated at what they see as unfair targeting of small businesses and nonprofits that make no money from the music they present.
Among them is Magret Gudmundsson, who until recently hosted a monthly acoustic open mike in her Middleborough cafe, Coffee Milano. “I like having it here, but we’re not making any money from it and they wanted $332 a year,’’ Gudmundsson said. “The town really needs something like this. They ruined it.’’
Performance license fees are calculated based on a variety of factors: a venue size and seating capacity, the number of musicians who perform there, and the number of live performances per week, among others. The average fee for a small coffeehouse would be $200 to $400. But owners could be required to buy licenses from all three PROs.
The PROs have been criticized for years for their aggressive stance; in the mid-1990s ASCAP bowed to public outcry after attempting to collect licensing fees from the Girl Scouts for singing campfire songs. (They now charge the scouts a symbolic $1 a year.) But Vincent Candilora, ASCAP’s senior vice president for licensing, has no sympathy for Gudmundsson and her ilk.
“They’re selling coffee for four dollars and they can’t afford a dollar a day for music? If they don’t think it’s worth it, that’s their choice,’’ Candilora said. “But I have to say that most people recognize that music is a value to their business. Every now and then we run into people that think, ‘I’m just a small little bar; they’re not going to sue me,’ and that’s a mistake. Frankly, once you’re on our radar we can’t let you go.’’
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