up for air

So I haven't posted in a while, as you may (or may not) have noticed. What can I say, work has been kicking my ass. Enough said about that.

This morning was BMI reporting day at the station. I guess I should mention that I've taken on a second radio show for the summer. It's a playlist show, just an hour long, from 9-10 am on Wednesdays. I took it to help fill holes in the summer schedule. It's fun to do playlist again, although not so much right now when I can't really spare the time.

Anyway, this morning was BMI reporting, which I had never done before. For three days every DJ has to write down songwriter information about every play. BMI collects this information from hundreds of stations and uses it to allocate royalties payments for the year. It's a bit of extra work to write all this stuff down -- on paper! -- on top of our regular playlist (why they couldn't just add a field to the normal electronic playlist is beyond me), but not that bad. The biggest problem I had was feeling pressure to make every play count: to play only artists I like and respect who aren't super famous and could use the money. I played as many of my favorites as I could fit into an hour (minus the playlist requirement of course) and the whole way home I kept thinking of others I should have played.

If I ever have to do this again I will try to play less sample-based electronic music. Because a lot of that stuff has no songwriter credit (in which case I wrote down the producer, let BMI figure it out). The biggest bummer was playing John Wesley Harding, whose music I adore, and then too late reading the label and seeing that he's ASCAP, not BMI. So he won't get a dime from that play. Sorry, John Wesley Harding! I tried, I really did. If we do ASCAP reporting this year I'll try to sub a show in the reporting period and play 2 of your songs.