April 11, 2025
Ms. Shira Perlmutter
Register of Copyrights
United States Copyright Office
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20559-6000
Dear Register Perlmutter:
The undersigned organizations are submitting these comments in response to the U.S. Copyright Office’s February 10, 2025 Notice of Inquiry (NOI) regarding issues related to music performance rights organizations (PROs).
We are all part of the U.S. business and professional events ecosystem, which includes show and event organizers, exhibitors, suppliers, nonprofit associations, venues, and more. Every day, we create moments that matter at conferences, meetings, trade shows, and exhibitions taking place nationwide.
We are also America’s small businesses supporting America’s small businesses! Our events are growth engines for U.S. small businesses across every major sector of the economy. In fact, 99% of all business events organizations are small businesses, and 80% of the 1.7 million exhibitors at our events from coast to coast are small businesses.
Music plays an important role at business and professional events, both as background ambiance and as a featured live element at some conferences and trade shows. We believe that playing music at our events should be a clear, straightforward, and fair process. Unfortunately, our small businesses find that navigating today’s music licensing landscape is anything but clear, straightforward, and fair. The proliferation of PROs and their lack of transparency have made it increasingly difficult for us to comply with the law without excessive costs, administrative burdens, and harassment.
If we want to play music, we must negotiate with multiple PROs, each of which collects fees on behalf of songwriters and publishers. The largest PROs—the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI); Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC); and Global Music Rights (GMR)—control different segments of the market. Recently, new entrants with questionable repertoires, including PRO Music Rights and AllTrack, are seeking similar license fees from event organizers, venues, and exhibitors.
We often have no choice but to obtain licenses from multiple PROs just to legally play a single song. Why? Many songs have multiple co-writers, each represented by a different PRO. As a result, a single song may require licenses from multiple PROs, which forces us to purchase overlapping blanket licenses to avoid potential copyright infringement risks.
To be clear, we have no problem paying to play music at our business and professional events. That said, we often must pay more than 100% of a given song’s value due to fragmented licensing. PROs do not compete for business licenses, nor do they allow organizations like ours to select the specific rights that they need. Instead, they often set their own prices, forcing us to pay whatever they demand.
Moreover, the overly aggressive, and often misleading and threatening, sales and collection practices of PROs have encouraged seven states—Iowa, Virginia, Oregon, Washington, Nebraska, Colorado, and Minnesota—to pass laws restricting some of their business practices.
Beyond that, we have great difficulty confirming whether the payment demands from PROs are legitimate. The U.S. lacks a centralized collection entity for the public performance of musical works or an official process to legitimize PROs. Any entity can become a PRO by acquiring licensing rights from a songwriter and demanding payment.
Finally, there is a lack of overall system transparency. There is no single, publicly available, authoritative database that allows us to verify which songs are covered by which PROs. Without this information, organizations like ours are forced to overpay for licenses that we may not need or take the legal risk of unknowingly playing music that we are not fully licensed to use.
In summary, we should be able to legally and easily play music at our conferences, meetings, trade shows, and exhibitions without being trapped in today’s broken music licensing system. Transparency in the music licensing marketplace is long overdue, and we fully support the Copyright Office’s efforts to examine these issues through this NOI.
For small businesses and organizations like ours struggling to navigate the complexities of music licensing, this is a critical step towards potential reform and creating a fairer and more competitive ecosystem that benefits both artists and licensees throughout the business and professional events sector alike.
Thank you for your attention to this important issue.
Sincerely,
