Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Right now, in both the UK and the US, copyright law actually prohibits the playing of recorded music anywhere in public — including in bars and pubs — without kickin’ something up to the suits that own the rights. If you’ve got a stereo in your bar or coffee shop or record store and you’re not paying exorbitant licensing fees on every song, you’re breaking the law. Sounds like a pretty unenforceable pile of baloney, no? Well, not to Dave Grohl, Kid Rock, little Taylor Swift, et al. By the end of last year, these and other millionaire celebrity musicians embarked upon suing small local venues to get them to stop playing without paying. Grohl and Rock teamed up to run an Ohio bar & grill through the mill; Taylor Swift is suing a bar in Idaho; it’s not exactly behavior befitting our supposedly free-wheelin’ rock n’ roll heroes. ASCAP, in the US, is generally the collector of this tax, while in the UK, they’ve got the Performing Right Society (PRS) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL).

Well, according to NME, a couple banded-together associations of pubs and other public establishments in the UK have just won a judgment by the British High Court that says that these recently jacked-up fees (which suddenly more than quadrupled in 2005) are unfair.  So what’s next for the pubs? They want their money back! read more