By: Jennifer, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada
A.B. Replies: You mean what happens when Celine Dion decides to shriek a live heartfelt tribute to Barbra Streisand by singing Papa, Can You Hear Me? in such a way that the tiny chain of bones in our inner ears dissolves like Alka-Seltzer in vinegar?
We pay with our blood. Celine pays nothing. And to the insidious viper who wrote Papa, Can You Hear Me?, the money is paid, indirectly, by the concert venue.
This B!tch tracked down Harry Poloner, vice president of the membership group for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. He tells me it works like this:
First, bunches of songwriters join ASCAP as members. Then every concert venue pays a yearly sum to ASCAP, basically buying the rights to present whatever songs are played there for the next 365 days. How big are these annual fees? Poloner can't say; apparently, the formula is a Rube Goldberg-inspired mess of cogs and levers and mice and cheese. But in general, he says, the bigger the venue, the more the owner pays in ASCAP fees.
Then when an Aerosmith comes along and plays a concert, the songwriter for each tune in the set gets paid some of the money from that venue's annual fee. Even Aerosmith gets paid for the songs it wrote.
"In theory," Poloner explains, "a band like Aerosmith will submit the set list to the performance rights organization, and the songwriters would each be paid in accordance with whatever the formula is for a venue of that size."
That's why it was so, like, incredibly important for Britney Spears to win that recent songwriting credit lawsuit filed by that mean little man named Steve Wallace. Wallace claimed he wrote Britney's 1999 hit Sometimes. Wallace had sued Spears, her album promoter, Sony/BMG Music Publishing and recording and publishing companies affiliated with the singer, claiming he had written the ditty 15 years ago, when Britney was still in hot pants. But Britney countered that she wrote Sometimes all by herself, using a pen and everything. (See? There are hearts instead of dots on top of every I. That's how you know it's Britney.)
Whoever owns the credit for writing Sometimes is the one who gets paid the songwriting fee whenever a singer bleats it live. And Britney needs that ASCAP fee money, 'cause Doritos don't grow on trees, you know.
Now, anytime anybody sings Sometimes, including Britney, our favorite piece of walking, trash-talking beignet gets paid a little something.
Thank God for justice, y'all!