ASCAP: Legalized Mafia?

I went to the Black Rose Caffe tonight to pay owners Mariah and Demetrius a visit, and to find out exactly what had gone down with ASCAP. The few details I'd heard about their decision to nix live music came to me secondhand. Maybe my earlier post on the subject was unfair, too hasty, too inflammatory. Maybe there was another side to this story.

Turns out my last post wasn't inflammatory enough. Mariah and Demetrius were happy to regale me with tales of the organization's misbehavior:

• ASCAP lawyers have been hammering Black Rose with phone calls and e-mails, pressuring them to pay the $800-or-so yearly licensing fee, plus back pay for the three years they've been in business. (BMI calls them too, but they're not as relentless.) Sadly, this is the most honorable tactic on the list.
  
  
• Sometimes Mariah and Demetrius get calls from people that go something like, "Hey, my buddy and I have a bet going. What band played at your place last week? There wasn't a band? Sure there was. You know, the band that played covers?"
  
  
• On one occasion, a homeless guy came in asking what the event was going to be for the night. When told that there was no event, he insisted there had to be one and looked around the room searching for it. (It's possible that this man was simply a little unbalanced, but in light of everything else, that's not my first guess.)
  

In my last post, I tried to give these guys some benefit of the doubt, saying I understood that they don't have the resources to send spies out to every little coffeehouse in the country. But if the above is any indication, they do have the resources ... and it doesn't matter. Truth be damned, their goal is to keep the pressure up until Black Rose caves and pays them.

"It's like the legalized Mafia," Mariah said.

Thwarted by ASCAP

This coming Friday, Cinder Bridge was supposed to play at the Black Rose Caffe, a goth-styled coffeehouse in town. Today they cancelled our gig. Actually, they decided they weren't going to have live music again. Ever.

Apparently they've been getting harassed by ASCAP. For the uninitiated, this organization collects fees from venues featuring bands that cover original artists. Said fees go to their members, the original artists who sign up with them.

Black Rose Caffe, a small locally owned business, didn't want to deal with the fees. They also had no desire to run afoul of the law. Their solution: hire live bands, but insist that all of the songs be originals. Whenever we played there, we made sure to take our small handful of covers off the set list.

Not good enough, I guess. The harassment continued. The BRC proprietors decided live music wasn't worth the hassle.

Look, we're original artists. We'd love to hit it big enough for other bands to cover us. It's nice to know that organizations like this vigilantly fight for intellectual property rights. The bullying tactics don't sit right with me, though. If anyone from ASCAP listened to our Black Rose Caffe sets, they'd know that we and BRC played by the rules.

I get that they don't have the resources to send spies out to every little coffeehouse in the country. But does that make it OK for them to lean on business owners when they have no evidence of cheating?

* * *

Update: Ron the Drummer tells me it was ASCAP doing the hassling, and that BMI wasn't involved. I've changed the title for this post and removed references to BMI accordingly.