I just signed up for BMI the other day. We are doing an album, and we were told that we should all sign up for either BMI or Harry Fox, etc... so we can get whatever royalties from sales and downloads. How the hell do they keep track of that shit?

Anyone else a member of one of those or something similar?

My boss is a member of BMI, he get's checks where the postage to mail them is more then the amount of the check.

I figured it would be like that.

I am--up here in Canada, it's via SOCAN (I think that my US representative is BMI), but if I have one word of advice to any band submitting to radio, it's to sign up at Nielsen BDS. Even if you don't submit to radio, i'd do it anyways.....some campus radio DJ's that bought your cd (or that possibly may have received the cd as a promo, if they also do reviews for places) might play your material anyways. I've received many royalty cheques for my own material.....granted, the cheques aren't much, but damned it it doesn't feel pretty fucking cool to have proof of receiving money for someone playing your stuff somewhere.

The cool thing is that Nielsen BDS takes a digital fingerprint of your songs and music, and it resolves the hassles of tracking. In the old days, it used to be that your song plays on radio would be judged during certain tracking periods.....which sometimes led to some really unfair and unrealistic numbers for bands, artists, and songs that had received airplay or charted during non-tracking periods.

There's a PDF here on how to sign up. It's fast and easy and i'm blown away at how easy Nielsen has made it to actually get paid for your music. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them here in this thread, or send me a PM.

Don't count on getting much money, if any. What you can count on though is discounts on lots of stuff.

Thanks for the link on that Ryan.

We're with ASCAP. I can't really tell any benefit so far though. Maybe the next album will generate huge profits, and the ASCAP guy will drive the money to me in a big truck.

I would rather it be a van though.

You're kidding, right? Give me a call, I belong to BMI...

Edit: quick advice though - don't take royalty deals, take merch options. Any royalty options in a contract, trade them for merch options as soon as you can. You will never see a cent of royalties, handle your own money as much as possible, the more people involved, the more it's going to shrink. Take your merch options, push it on Big Cartel/online store, and sell it at shows. Handle your own money, keep it in house. Very, very few bands in this genre are EVER going to generate sales that warrant any royalties whatsoever, and most of them are going to end up losing out on those royalties anyways because their contracts have such fine print, not to mention advances, loans, and such.

Even Last.FM owes me money, but they've locked down our account as we're now "popular".

To clarify, Meteorcity and all of our various labels have been great to work with, as I've been very strict about following the above advice.

The reason to be a member of BMI is NOT royalties for sales. BMI has nothing to do with that. BMI tracks publishing, so they track licensing deals, airplay, etc. You'll never make any money from sales if you're doing "stoner rock", but there is money to be made in licensing/sync fees and such for video games, movies, TV, etc. In fact, that's really the only way to make money doing music these days unless you're U2 or something, or a hip hop producer.

Again, Nielsen BDS really helps in getting paid for airplay. I've got my biggest cheques for material that I haven't even promoed for in a year or two or more. If you've done some sort of active or semi heavy campus radio campaign, you'll still get paid for it later. I play music that isn't even remotely commercial, yet i'm still getting paid quarterly per year for the material being played on specialty shows and whatnot. If you're a label, it may be a great idea to register your artists' material (with their consent, of course).....again, while the money isn't that much, it is something, and it feels pretty cool to get those cheques. You can even get direct deposit straight into your bank. There seems to be a really defeatist, self-fullfilling prophecy that bands and artists have against not getting paid royalties, "can't/ won't/ shouldn't/ don't"...."oh, it won't be that much", "well, everyone will get paid BUT me", etc. IMHO, you're a straight outright fool for not taking the ten minutes that it takes to sign up at Nielsen BDS. You don't have to do anything--no paperwork, no anything, no additional catches--except watch that money roll right into your bank account. It actually takes me off guard when I see that money in my bank account statements.

If there's multiple songwriters, you can decide, as a band, to allocate the percentages of the songwriting to whoever was involved, and those people get paid directly, too (this is something that you decide on when you register the songs and upload the WAV files to a database). It sounds too easy, but this is one of those things that it is that easy, because it's meant to actually compensate artists for their songs and material being played wherever it is being played.

I'm gonna let Dinger handle the money. He's got it covered.

I am about to re-enlist with ASCAP for my own stuff, so very interested in this thread.