by Serguey Shinder
In the summer of 2023 we shared a bill in Sheffield with a singer who has been writing and gigging for twenty years. Loading out, she asked whether we sent our setlists in. I did not know what she meant. She explained it twice, slowly, the way you explain something to a person who is costing themselves money.
Most venues that put on live music pay for a licence to do it, and in Britain part of that money is shared out among the writers of the songs performed. The way it finds the writers is that somebody tells it what was played. If the band plays its own songs and reports them, the writers receive a share. If nobody reports anything, the money does not stay in the venue or wait for you. It is distributed using whatever information the society does have, which is to say among other people's songs.
We had been playing our own material for four years, around forty gigs a year, nearly all of them in licensed venues. None of us were members. None of our songs were registered. Every one of those gigs had paid something towards songwriters, and none of it had reached the people who wrote what was actually played.
The sums at our level are not large, and I want to be honest about that. They are not nothing either. We joined, registered the songs, and reported what was still within the time limit for reporting, which was far less than we had played. In our first full year of reporting properly, what came back paid for the van hire for every gig we did that year. Which for a band like ours is the difference between a gig costing money and a gig breaking even.
What actually changed was not joining. It was making the reporting happen the morning after, every time, without anybody having to remember. The setlist taped to the stage is photographed before it is peeled up, by whoever is driving home, because the driver is the only one of us reliably sober. The next morning our drummer files it with the venue name and date, from his phone, before he does anything else. We keep a list of every gig, with a column that says filed, and at the end of each month somebody looks for an empty cell.
It takes about five minutes a gig. For the first three years we would have said we did not have five minutes, and that the band was about the music, not the paperwork. The paperwork, it turns out, was where the songs got their writers' names on them.
Money you do not claim is almost never left waiting for you. Somebody else's name gets written on it by default.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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