It is surprising to know that there are only a very few commercial establishments who fully understand the process and reason of why there is a need to license music in order to play it in public or in their own establishments.

As a background, the law of copyright granted “public performance” as one of the rights of the copyright holder (Source: http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html ). This means that because he/she is the copyright holder, he/she has the right to perform the songs in the public.

Definition of public is “a place open to the public or at a place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances are gathered”. Therefore below is the list of public places:

a. Public Malls
b. Scope of the radio broadcast/transmission
c. Offices
d. Parks
e. Beach resorts
f. Hotels
g. Movie Theatres

And the list goes on and on. Now what if someone wants to play a copyrighted song in public? The answer is that, the person needs to contact the copyright owner or the publisher and asked for a “public performance license”. For example, if you are a restaurant owner and you play music in your restaurant. If that music does not belong to yours but to some songwriters/publishers then you need to secure a public performance license with them.

Of course, with respect to the songwriters/publishers, it would be impossible tasks to monitor all public performances in a worldwide scope. For example, how do the songwriter/publisher know that his./her song was being performed in a New York City based television channels and the songwriter is living in Los Angeles or even in Japan? It would also be very different and odd that the music publisher/songwriter will be collecting royalties to each of these public establishments playing their music, knowing that if the music will be promoted globally. It now seems a very different and seemingly impossible tasks to have all the royalties systematically monitored and collected.

This is where ASCAP, BMI and SESAC; also known as the public performance right societies come into play. Their main job is to represent the music publisher/songwriter in monitoring and tracking public performances as well as collecting and distributing royalties to its members. With these societies, the method of collection and tracking will now be easy for a songwriter and instead of concentrating on these things; he/she will just focus on writing songs.So in the summary, if you need a license to play music in public, you need to contact each of these public performance right societies. They will assist you in your public performance licensing needs.