By Shane Goodman shane@dmcityview.com

Imagine having sheriff’s deputies and police officers enter your business and serve a court order to confiscate money from your cash register. Imagine having to give it to them. Now imagine trying to continue to run your business after this happens four times in three weeks. And all this due to local musicians playing songs at your place of business that are licensed by an organization representing songwriters and publishers.

That’s what happened to Blues on Grand recently. And similar incidents have happened at Miss Kitty’s Dance Hall and Cyber Saloon. Expect more of this soon at local clubs with live music. Club managers and owners like Jeff Wagner and J. Michael McKoy aren’t happy about it, but they know they can’t win this battle. And they want fellow club owners to know that if they’re caught operating without a license, they, too, risk losing thousands of dollars in court settlements to an industry that has never lost a trial.

Were these local clubs in the wrong? Depends upon who you talk to. Certainly the songwriters and publishers deserve to be paid when others profit from their work. And Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) has a responsibility to protect and compensate its clients. But putting local clubs out of business would only hurt BMI and those they represent. With license fees tripling in recent years, local club owners like Wagner and McKoy are questioning the licensing system procedure more than the policy. They see BMI as a monopoly, or at the bare minimum, a complicated bureaucracy with rules that are unfair to live music venues.

This week’s cover story shares these local clubs’ stories and their struggles with BMI. It also shares how and why BMI goes after clubs that fail to pay royalties for music they play. Copyright law is tricky, to say the least, but Editor Michael Swanger does a fantastic job of making it relevant to those of us who know little about the subject.

What impresses me the most about this story is the support from patrons and local bands that are hosting a benefit concert this Sunday at Blues on Grand. “The Shakedown Downtown” will help the club pay off the balance of its BMI bill. I can’t think of very many other businesses with patrons willing to make these kinds of extra efforts. And that says a lot about what the club means to the local music scene.

Thanks for reading.

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