Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for August 03, 2023

Thinking you had to have a big enough footprint to get caught. Also thinking that’s Mary Lou and she did not share Gus’s love of Jazz.

I feel sure Danny, Dae, Joanna and Antonia Bennett thank you.

Absolutely they will!

My (late) brother operated a pizza restaurant down in Phoenix, and a guy showed up one day during lunch, ordered a slice and a drink and dined in…

At the end, he came up to my brother at the counter, showed his card, and said he was going to send over an invoice for the music playing in the restaurant.

It was a radio in the kitchen playing for the workers, and people in the dining area could hear it.

He fought it, and won. More than likely, ASCAP didn’t want to spend a lot of time and money on one little restaurant in Phoenix, AZ.

My experience with ASCAP was when they tried to steal my (now closed) business 800 number by convincing my phone provider that they were buying it from us and they could transfer it. Forged my info. We got it back and some money from the phone company.

They are NOT good guys.

Of all the conversations Arlo & Gus could have this wouldn’t have been in my top 1000 guesses.

What’s he holding in panel 3? A cigar? A frozen toupee?

This was in the days before student loans.

Gus fits the bill.…in the real words of longtime Jazz radio show host Ron Cuzner,

http://www.roncuzner.com/YourEvening.mp3

It’s my humble, but somewhat educated opinion, that all men, indeed, all women, are created cool.

Some of us, however, require the magic and the mystery of midnight to achieve our full coolness.

No idea where this is going but it is strangely prescient- thinking of the writer’s and actor’s strike. our creators need to be recognized and supported- surrounding the A list actors, etc -there are all the others who make our entertainment possible and who deserve just compensation and security. AJ is a writer at base and I am sure he knows their struggles. AI can surely come for cartoonists as well?.

I take it from Mary Lou’s face in panel 2 that she is either not a jazz fan or has heard the music so much, she’d rather not be a jazz fan.

By all that is holy, I swear that soft jazz is an abomination before God.

Yesterday I read that the guy who wrote “Spirit in the Sky” has been living off the royalties for 50 years.

So, in Gus’s world, you can go ahead and steal from Tony Bennett all day long if you don’t get caught. Actually, assuming he piped in his music from AM/FM terrestrial radio in the USA, he never paid Tony Bennett a dime—those payments went to the people who wrote the songs. Tony made his money from the record sales, not from the airplay. Didn’t realize that until I went down this rabbit hole! Check out https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-royalties for way more than you ever wanted to know.

Interesting topic.

If you only have one speaker in your establishment, play any music you want in most states without paying any royalties…..

I’ve never understood this lifetime income from something you produce. Music and actors seem to have this scheme where they get paid in perpitude for their work. Artists don’t get income from each time their artwork is sold. Quite a scam they have going there. And then apparently there is some “company” that comes along to make sure the song people get their due. But I’m sure this ASCAP must get their cut somewhere along the line. Seems like the mafia. I’m sure I’ll get comments excoriating me and telling me song people depend on this revenue. That doesn’t make it right.

Has Gus turned into Tommy Lee Jones?

I was a street performer for many years, and of all crazy things, one busy night the ASCAP people were making the rounds, harassing all the performers who were using pop music in their shows; threatening them with legal action unless they anted up. It was a big hullabaloo. In my show I used all public domain material, so they were unable to hassle me, and I told them to go take a long hike off a short pier. You never saw so many angry people, and I don’t think the suits got any money from anyone.

Soft Jazz is a particularly obnoxious genre of muzak. Trad Jazz is music.

“It’s better than music, it’s Jazz.” Cmdr William T. Riker.

Been there, done that. You don’t f##k with ASCAP.

PROs (Performance Rights Organizations) are a great idea, but horribly executed. (ASCAP is one of the US PROs; BMI and SESAC are the others. I think this is the only country with more than one PRO.) Making sure that creators get paid when someone uses their work is a wonderful thing. Not breaking down “users” into enough categories is bad. (My 100-seat, non-profit, one-concert-per-month room is charged the same rate as a 2,500-seat, for profit, 8-shows per week venue.) Paying from the top down is bad (i.e, those who earned the most are paid first, so those who earned the least aren’t paid what they earned, or sometimes aren’t paid anything at all, because after paying expenses and paying the people at the top, there’s nothing left.) Having workers on commission is bad (because they are in it to get the most money, rather than working for a deal that benefits everybody; venues will shut down forever for no other reason than they can’t afford the PRO fees.) Not listening to their customers (i.e, the music users) is bad. For more than a year, one of the PROs has been sending me contracts, telling me that I have to sign or else. BUT, they contracts already have information pre-filled in… and some of it is wrong, including my address. I can’t and won’t sign a contract that says my address is that of a different business; I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t even be legal. So for more than a year I have been telling them “You have to change this to the CORRECT info or I can’t sign.” They have ignored me for more than a year…