I would like to comment:

A Canadian songwriters registers his/her songs with the Candian collective. The songs then become part of the Canadian collective’s repertoire. The Canadian collectives then shares its repertoire with other foreign collectives. But these foreign collectives have a long list of bad habits, including but not limited to these:

1. Copies of the Canadian collective’s repertoire are never published in the foreign countries to licensees such as restaturants, night clubs, or televicion and radio stations. Actually not even the local repertoires are published. The end result is that the licensees actually feel that they are not really licensing repertoire’s and are just paying protection money. Nothing appropiate here. Surely the Canadian collective knows about this methd of operation of the foreign collective it represents in Canada. Does it distribute copies of it’s repertoire and the foreign repertoires it represents to their Canadian licensees (customers)? Surely no and that puts the Canadian collectie in the same category as the foreign associated collectives.

2. They distribution of the money the collectives collect is distributed, they say, based on samplings and logs. But this is pure fiction.

No external audits of the sampling records and logs are made. Not that it makes any difference, auditors in the foreign countries can be taken for lunch when they are supposedly working. Reason 1 above could not be true if honest audits were made. The scam would be detected.

3. The collectives are run by a small group of business persons, usually representing the interests of music publishers (a very corrupt lot) who have infiltrated the boards. Guess where the money is diverted to? Not to songwriters but to the pockets of music publishers.

The end result:

a. The Canadian songwrite’s song will likeky not be performed abroad because the name of his song cannot be associated with the licenses issued by the foreign collectives, 1 above being the reason.

b. If by chance the song were performed, the performances will never apear on ficticious samplings and logs and thus no money will be credited to the songwriter.

c. No one knows how much money was paid to each songwriter member of the collectives. There is no published list of payments. Only a few “spokeperson” insider songwriters speak well of the system. My guess is that the spopersons songwriters are paid for their pro collective publicity work by a music publisher.

With the history of composer collective societies, an original good idea that became corrupted, most deserving songwriters will never make any money with their music in the collectives.

BTW: My father was a founder of the Puerto Rico Composers Socety a collective. This collective was purposely destroyed when foreign publishers and collectives invaded our country. Lately, a music publisher-collective claims that they own the old collective’s repertoire. This publisher-collective combo pays no royalties for the songs they claim to have in their repertoire, while the federal and local governments look sideways. Strangely the big American collectives that operate here have filed no complaint (that I know of). They protect each other or know too much about their method of operation.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com