Sorry Mudjack but ASCAP, BMI and pals have never bothered to do anything approaching a thorough survey on US TV or Cable, and the foreign societies like the PRS let them get away with it. I know a widow who lives off her late husband's royalties. She ain't rich. Her husband wrote a theme for a 6-part series. The US collecting society picked up one broadcast of one episode. She got paid for one broadcast of one episode. Where was the money for the other 5? In the pocket of the collecting society because the broadcaster pays a blanket fee to the collecting society.

Tell me again that the collecting societies will look after the smaller fully professional composer. They use the revenues from popular music to subsidise "classical" and dance to the tunes of the mega-composers (U2 spent over GBP1 million on their litigation with the UK PRS, I have heard it rumoured) and the big music corporations - the music publishers controlled by the record companies and TV companies.

The UK's PPL (there is no direct US equivalent, I think. PPL controls the performing right not in music but in recordings of music. Records have in the UK a copyright which has a performing right element I think in the USA this is not so) handed over many millions of pounds sterling to the musicians' union. It conceptually arose from the performance of recordings of the work of the faceless army of session musicians. The faces had a separate stream of money paid to them. No money (until very recently, and that a relatively small proportion) was paid by the union to the faceless ones. No system of fair apportionment was ever worked out. The money was spent on "good works". Now that there is a statutory right PAMRA (the collecting society for the new right) wants the session musicians to produce documentary proof of what records they played on thirty forty and fifty years ago.

A fair system so that all musicians (composers and performers) can get their proper remuneration from all uploads and downloads of their music and performances is vital. Leave it to the industry and you won't get it.

And bear in mind that if you say that MP3 enables those who would otherwise not get a hearing to get heard and paid, you are telling musicians they have to pay to be heard. How many blues labels used there to be? How many great blues songs and performances were signed away outright in perpetuity for twenty dollars. How many composers are being pressured right now into composing "library music" for a flat fee? How many composers are being told that if they want their commissioned music synchronised with films (movies) or TV they will have to assign their publishing rights to some tame publisher? In this environment the free market system does not work. It only enables the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

Make sure the internet pays composers and performers fairly. Start work now. Leave it to the politicians and you will get the "Fairness in music licensing" Act and worse. Remember that act, tacked on to the end of an allegedly reforming copyright act to extend US copyright to bring it into line with modern European copyright, frees some places to use music to add value to their services rendered to the public (and so get more customers) without having to pay for the music they use to add that value.