THE COMING OF BMI

A BIT OF MUSIC INDUSTRY HISTORY FROM MY BOOK ‘THE BUSINESS’, PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND BOOKS, AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE.

In 1939, in America, ASCAP was a society of top publishers, songwriters, lyricists and composers jointly demanding a license fee from every radio station and movie theatre in the USA. It was a monopoly. It was a society of the elite.

There were tens of thousands of songwriters and small publishers all across America but ASCAP still had only 1,100 members. The society was making ever-increasing profits for its members yet it excluded three-quarters of all songwriters and music publishers in America. Writers had to prove they’d had five ‘hits’ before they were allowed in, and a ‘hit’ didn’t mean a jazz, blues or country song. The five hits needed to have been mainstream popular music. Gene Autry, the songwriting cowboy movie star, couldn’t get in, nor could jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, nor blues singer Bessie Smith.

In 1939, under ASCAP’s monopoly, radio stations across America were playing much the same music as they’d been playing when radio started in 1920. Sweet, sentimental, cute, nostalgic, danceable – music from the age of Broadway, and latterly of Hollywood. Nothing was ever heard that was edgy, risky, provocative or even mildly exciting.

If local radio stations played music that was not from writers or publishers affiliated to ASCAP, they had to pay for it anyway because ASCAP’s license was based on the total number of hours during which the stations played music of any sort. In a coast-to-coast survey, Variety reported that radio stations saw ASCAP as “working one huge squeeze play whose only virtue seems to be that it is legal”.

In the autumn of 1939, the two major radio networks – RCA and CBS – set up a rival performing rights organization. The new society was Broadcast Music Industries (BMI), and in February 1940 it opened an office in New York with the announcement that it had signed up three-quarters of all the radio stations in America, including the major networks. The new society’s license fees would be half of those charged by ASCAP, and the radio stations who had signed to BMI announced that from the end of the year they would not be renewing their ASCAP licenses.

ASCAP laughed. As far as they could see BMI had no music to license. But BMI had been working on that. It had persuaded two major publishers to jump ship from ASCAP and join them instead. One was Edward B. Marks, whose catalogue included a large number of old songs dating back to the early 1900s. The other was Ralph Peer’s Southern Music who had the biggest catalogue of black and country songs in the world, most of them never before played on radio, plus most of the best-known Latin songs too, like ‘Granada’, ‘Mambo Number Five’, ‘Perfidia’, ‘Besame Mucho’.

ASCAP had totally misjudged the mood of the radio stations. Almost none of them renewed their ASCAP licenses and at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1940, ASCAP’s music disappeared from the airwaves. Moreover, all the composers, songwriters and small publishers that ASCAP had never allowed in, now signed to BMI.

ASCAP still thought they’d win. For listeners there would be no more songs from Broadway or Hollywood, nothing from Irving Berlin or Jerome Kern or Rodgers & Hart, just a few corny old songs from Edward B. Marks’ catalogue and a mass of unfamiliar tunes from Ralph Peer’s. ASCAP waited for a howl of protest from the public but it never came.

Marks and Peers did well. They hadn’t joined for nothing. BMI guaranteed the Marks company performance royalties of $250,000 a year, four times more than it had been receiving from ASCAP. And Ralph Peers, by coming in, had finally get his huge catalogue of black, country and Latin songs heard by the public. Moreover, he could now promise his writers they could join a collection society.

For almost a year BMI music dominated radio throughout America. It was difficult to believe that until now blues and country music had hardly been heard. Now, there was no music from Hollywood movies or Broadway shows – and none of the old hits.

Because Duke Ellington had been allowed into ASCAP, his band now couldn’t perform any of his best-known songs on their weekly radio show. Billy Strayhorn, his arranger, had never been accepted by ASCAP so he became a member of BMI. But with no songs in the Ellington catalogue that weren’t already registered with ASCAP, he had just one week to produce enough new compositions to fill the next show. In the trash can he found a song he’d thrown away. It now became the band’s new signature tune – ‘Take the “A” Train’.

By the end of the year ASCAP was defeated. The best-known writers of the last two decades were simply not being heard. And Hollywood film, studios, unable to get music from their movies onto radio, were threatening to form new publishing companies and affiliate them with BMI.

ASCAP caved in and offered new radio licenses at rates below their previous levels. It meant most radio stations would now be paying for two licenses, one to each society, yet the combined cost of both was less than the increased fee ASCAP had originally asked for. Moreover, radio stations now had double the amount of music available to them.

BMI provided access to the American music market for thousands of writers and musicians who had previously been denied it. It made songwriting a career anyone could choose. It liberated black music and later on it opened the door to rock ’n’ roll. Yet it had only come about because broadcasters wanted to increase their profits.

It was the usual music industry story – greed bred progress.

CLICK SUBSCRIBE - LEAVE YOUR EMAIL - IT’S FREE - GET A PIECE A WEEK