A DJ, a karaoke champ and a cover band walk into a bar … and if any of them plan to perform, the bar had better be licensed. Local venues featuring music—live or recorded—were reminded of that last week, when Adrenaline Sports Bar and Grill in northwest Las Vegas got served with a lawsuit for allegedly failing to pay licensing fees to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
“Whenever music is performed publicly, there’s an obligation to make sure the songwriter is being compensated properly,” says Jackson Wagener, vice president of business and legal affairs for the not-for-profit ASCAP. “When a bar is playing good music, it brings in more customers. It’s only fair that they compensate the people writing the music.”
Wagener says Adrenaline, which opened in 2014 and frequently hosts touring and local music acts, was contacted more than 40 times about licensing fees totaling $2,800 per year. “That’s $8 per day, which we think is more than fair,” he says. ASCAP’s fee formula figures in three factors, according to Wagener: a venue’s capacity, its use and frequency of music and whether it charges a cover. “There are more than 10 million copyrighted works in ASCAP,” Wagener says. “Once a venue pays the fee, they can play as many of them as often as they want.”
More than 1,000 Las Vegas-area business hold ASCAP licenses, most of them restaurants and nightclubs. Wagener says ASCAP is now in settlement talks with Adrenaline. “I’m hopeful we’ll have this resolved quickly.”
