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In reply to the discussion: Open mic nights at bar lead to lawsuit from BMI over music, ask for $121,000 [View all]Cleita
(75,480 posts)not Wall Street, usually run by a family. However, you don't have to promote music to make money. When we had music in the place I worked, the musicians passed the hat cuz frankly a lot of them were amateurish, needed polish and they played a niche genre, Celtic music. Some times they drove out business, but my boss liked to give them a chance to perform. He usually didn't pay them because to do that you had to charge at the door and without name recognition for a start up band, no one was going to do that. Some of the bands played their own music they wrote themselves or they play old stand bys that probably date back to the Renaissance. This is what the music "protectors" claimed were copyrighted. Really? Most of the bards from times past were long dead and no one knew who originally had written them to begin with.
So if you can book name talent, you charge at the door and increase the prices of your product. You pay the groups part of the door actually most of it. In that case I would say yes, pay your license, but not what we were doing, nor what other mom and pop places are doing for open mic. That's just extortion.
btw about the free beer. That's what happy hours are about. You charge only what it costs you. Believe me the beer distributors don't give it to you free, but the retailer is basically giving it away for free. But happy hour is a good will gesture on the part of the owner and a way to get people to come into your place for the first time. If they like it they will come back even when it isn't happy hour.