I was a DJ at a college radio station when I was a student AGES ago. This was a really tiny station. Our only "antenna" was the electrical wiring in the dorms. You could only pick up the station if you had a radio that was plugged into that wiring. And there were only 2000 students at that college, most of whom weren't listening.

Yet we ran everything by the book. We logged every single song that we played, on paper—we had no computers in those days. Name of artist, title of song, title of album, label and catalog number of album, date and time that the song was played.

I didn't have a clue back then what the purpose of the logs was, but I think I do now. I believe they were periodically turned in to ASCAP and BMI, and were used by them, along with logs from every other station, big or small, to compile the statistics which determined how the money they collected would be divided up. And I believe our license (which is, after all, a contract) with ASCAP and BMI required us to keep these logs and turn them in.

I've heard that juke boxes also keep a count of how many times each song is played, and this information also gets reported to ASCAP and BMI. (Maybe not all juke boxes, maybe just a statistically significant sample of them?)

So I think it's misleading to say "Fees paid for live performances are NOT shared with the writers." I think the truth is, small live-music venues are not required to log the songs they play (I'll bet the 40,000-seat stadiums do), and so performing a song in a live venue does not DIRECTLY result in a payment to the writer. Instead, the PROs simply assume that songs are being played in those non-reporting venues in the same proportion that they are being played on radio stations and the bigger venues, and they apportion their royalties accordingly.

So the money that is collected from live venues DOES get paid to writers—it's just that it might not be the correct writers.

So if you write a song that is ONLY played in live venues and NEVER played on the radio, then you won't receive any money from ASCAP or BMI. But if your song IS played on the radio, then you will receive a proportional share of the money that is collected from the radio stations AND from the live venues.

And it's not true that only the big commercial stations are counted. Of course they count MORE because they have bigger audiences, but the small college and public stations are counted, too, in proportion to the size of their audience.