VOTE FOR ME

It was a sunny day, the first Sunday in November, back in 1980. I was in the kitchen of my little farmhouse, first homesteaded by Rutherford B. Hayes . . . yes, that Rutherford B. Hayes. Technically, my address was R.R. 2, Inman, Kansas, but actually, I was 11 miles from Inman, in a different county. But Inman was the closest “town” with a post office.

My 20 acre Kansas horse farm was located on the southwest corner of a mile square section of land, on a dirt road. Back then; all the roads in the county, except the major highways, were dirt. But I didn’t mind. The house was far enough off the road; it didn’t get the dust thrown up by the occasional passing car. My nearest neighbor was over a mile away, across the flat wheat fields, but with the Cottonwood and Cyprus trees lining the sections, I couldn’t see any signs of civilization. It was beautiful.

Standing in my kitchen (which was also my dining room and living room); I could see a pick-up pass along the road in the distance . . . an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon. I didn’t think anything of it until, some minutes later; the truck came down my long, sandy driveway and parked by my kitchen window. I had just moved to Kansas three months before and knew very few people, including the nicely dressed older couple who just pulled onto my land. While the woman stayed in the cab of the truck, the farmer got out carrying a tin. Before he could knock at my door, I was there, curious as to who would even know where I lived.

“Afternoon young lady, I’m Jackson Whitaker and my wife Opal Mae is yonder in the truck. I’m running for County Clerk in Tuesday’s election, and Miss Opal and I are driving around the county introducing ourselves to the county folk. We’re delivering these cookies that Miss Opal made and asking for your vote.”

Wow. I grew up near Newark, New Jersey, where the mayor ran for re-election from his jail cell . . . and won. I was unaccustomed to this.

“How sweet . . . won’t you come in?” I offered, pleased to have visitors to my lonely abode.

“That’s nice of you, Little Missy, but we have a lot more people to go see.  Just remember to vote for me, Jackson Whitaker for County Clerk, on Tuesday.  Enjoy the cookies.”

I promised I would, seeing that he made the effort to come all the way out to my place with homemade cookies, just to ask for my vote. That would never happen in New Jersey.

Tuesday came, and I was sitting in my office in Hutchinson, and I figured I had better find out where I needed to go to vote.  I called the Rice Co. Courthouse to find my precinct.

“Hello. I’m new to Kansas and I need to know where to vote. I live in Inman.”

“Are you in Inman?” the lady asked.

“No, I’m in Rice County.” I corrected.

“Then you’ll have to go to the old Rice County Elementary School just outside of Lyons, on the 9 mile road.”

“The nine mile road? How do I get there from R.R. 2?”

After writing down the directions that included, “Go 20 miles west, turn right at the big red barn, go three sections, and then another right by the two silos on the old Roland place, and then a left at the stop sign . . . you can’t miss it.” I felt lost already.

But, I’m always up for a challenge, so I thanked her and was about to hang up the phone when she said, “Don’t forget to get there before 5 p.m.”

“Before 5?” I inquired. “I thought the polls stayed open until 7.”

“Well, there’s no electricity in the old school, so you have to get there before the sun goes down.”

“No electricity?” I was baffled . . . then added, “So, how do you run the voting machines?”

“Voting machines?” she replied, as if I had spoken another language.

I thanked her and hung up the phone, planning to leave work in plenty of time to get to Lyons. I knew it would take me the better part of an hour to get to the polling place, so I left work at 3:30. One thing about driving in Kansas . . . it’s all straight lines.

I followed her directions and sure enough, past the barn, the sections and the silos, I turned left at the stop sign and there I was, in the dirt parking lot of an abandoned red-brick school building. There was one other car in the lot. I entered the building, and into what was the gym/cafeteria at one point.

There were two ladies sitting behind a desk in the middle of the room . . . one of them was crocheting, the other reading a book.  “You must be Lynn, number 35. You’re the last one. We’ve been waiting for you.”

They offered me a cookie and a small, paper cup of punch, pointed to the solitary card table and chair, and presented me with an inch thick, stapled package of legal-sized paper. Each office up for election was on a separate page beginning with the candidates for President: Jimmie Carter and Ronald Reagan, among others. Then there was a page containing names of those running for Vice President, a page of names for the Senate seat, the Congressional candidates, the State Senate, the State Congress, and so on . . . all on separate pages.

I leafed through the papers, one after the other, searching for the County Clerk page to find the name Jackson Whitaker, to vote for the nice man who came to my farmhouse, homemade cookies in hand, to ask for my support. I finally got to the County Clerk page expecting to search through all the candidates to find him, and there was his name . . . Jackson Whitaker.

He was running unopposed!

SOPA and PIPA…A SONGWRITER’S PERSPECTIVE

This is a true David and Goliath story . . . and don’t forget, David was a songwriter. With all the uproar and misinformation being circulated I thought, as a working songwriter (yes, it’s my real job), I would weigh in on the issue.

For me, the Internet has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because now people all over the world can hear my music, and a curse because now people all over the world can hear my music . . . for FREE. There is already a law in place that allows the Justice Department to shut down US sites that illegally traffic in copyrighted material . . . it’s called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and I worked to get that Bill passed through Congress in 1998. If the U.S. has such a law to limit the illegal “Downlooting” of copyrighted material, why shouldn’t foreign sites be held to the same laws?

There has been a lot of “The Sky Is Falling” misinformation circulating on the Web. This information is coming from large corporations like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Ted TV. Google makes a huge percentage of its profits from illegal sites, so they don't want them to be shut down. These bills would have impacted Google's ability to get for free, content that they get paid advertising dollars to "locate," or use in their social network. I have yet to see any songwriter get paid money from Google, Wikipedia or any of the other large conglomerates who make Billions in advertising dollars on the backs of the creators, who get paid in micro-pennies. . . talk about the 1%!

The eighth commandment, Thou Shalt Not Steal is a commandment, not a suggestion. Every religion has a form of this. I wouldn’t think of walking onto a Porsche car lot and “sharing” the newest 911 Turbo. After all, the Porsche Company is so rich, they wouldn’t miss one. Or, walking into an Apple store and “sharing” their I-Pad 2, MacPro, the new MacBook Air or even an I-Pod for that matter . . . Apple, Inc. has so much money, they wouldn’t even miss it. No, I don’t do it because it's stealing. Just like I don’t want people to steal my tangible property, I don’t want them to steal my intellectual property either. I didn’t start out as a rich songwriter, and I am not rich now, but I did sacrifice a lot to get where I am. For decades, I worked hard at two jobs, as a single Mom, raising a daughter who ate peanut butter and jelly everyday of her life till she graduated from high school (insert violins here).

It’s still surprisingly easy to set up a site that offers illegal content and profit from it from advertising and subscriptions or sales. And when such sites are operated overseas, they are effectively impossible for copyright holders to reach through DMCA takedowns or an ordinary copyright infringement lawsuit, yet such services are available to anyone in the US with an internet connection. SOPA and PIPA would have given the Attorney General and copyright holders more effective remedies designed to cut off the money flowing to these types of rogue websites.

And how would free speech in the U.S. be affected by shutting down websites in Russia or China who traffic in illegal activity? It wouldn’t!  And how would it heIp songwriters get paid their rightful royalties? I guess we’ll never know since SOPA and PIPA have been postponed indefinitely.

In this fight of David and Goliath . . . looks like Goliath won this round! What a truly sad day for all copyright holders indeed.

How Songwriters Get Paid (Can we say Micro-Pennies?)

Question: How do you get a songwriter off your front porch?  Answer: You pay him for the pizza.

That joke would be funny if it weren’t so true. More and more songwriting professionals in the music industry have to find creative ways to make money from their craft.

In my last quarterly BMI statement (BMI is Broadcast Music Incorporated, one of three Performing Rights Organizations in the U.S., and the one which collects my performance royalties), the payment on one particular song caught my eye.  Remember, the Performance Royalty is money made from all broadcast performances…terrestrial radio, satellite radio, internet, digital jukeboxes, digital audio services, aircraft, and background music services.

Under background music services, one of my songs was played 187,430 times on two different services, Muzak and CMS. I was thrilled! That meant, for that quarter, my song was being played over 7,809 times a day in different parts of the country . . . times two! My brain was at warp speed thinking of all the ways I could spend the money that those 374,860 plays represented. After tithes and offerings, I could pay off my daughter’s student loans, help my son with his writing career, update this old computer, modernize some 20 yr. old equipment for the studio, hire some musicians for upcoming projects and maybe even start a savings account. Dare I even say those words? Inspirations were blasting into my brain.

It took a matter of nanoseconds for those dreams to be shattered as my eye traveled from the “Count” column, past the “Period,” “Bonus Level,” and “Your %” columns to the “Royalty Amount” column. I sought the number of digits that would be to the left of the decimal point.

I was shocked to see that for all those 187,430 plays on CMS I made $3.63 (that’s not $3.63 a play, it’s $3.63 cents total, for all the plays).  For the same amount of performances on Muzak, I made $5.34, total...double the money. Awesome!

Two questions came to mind. Why are the two amounts so different if they’re both background music services; and, Why am I only getting $.00001 cent (one one-hundred thousandth of a cent) every time my song is broadcast?

Oh, “Bitter” . . . table for one!

I quickly checked the other Background Music Services for the same song.  Playnet played it 702 times and paid me $.57 (that’s $.0008 a play…I’m getting a raise!). The next was Sirius XM Communications. They played it 4 times, but I got $.06 (that’s 1½ cents per play). I’m in the money now.

You can see how hard it is to make a living as a non-performing songwriter. When you get paid every three months, it gives the word “Budget” a whole new meaning.

So, the next time you order a large Meat-Lovers or Super-Veggie pizza, remember to tip the delivery person well.  They just may have written your favorite song.

Donna Ulisse, Lynn Gillespie Chater, Kerry Chater...talk about co-writing.

SONGS ARE TIME MACHINES

Show of hands…how many of you can remember the first time you saw or heard The Beatles?  I was a child, sitting in the living room watching The Ed Sullivan Show.  It was something we did as a family every Sunday night right before Perry Mason (my Dad was a lawyer and never missed that show).  We all gazed with wonder as the mop-headed four came out and sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; she loves you….” on black and white TV.  I can still see the girls in the live (not taped) audience wearing their shirt waist dresses and cardigan sweaters, screaming, shouting and crying.  The screams grew louder as each band member's name was written on the TV screen.  Even Lady Gaga doesn’t evoke such a reaction. I still remember my Mom turning to us and saying, “It’ll never replace the ‘Blue Danube Waltz!’”  Boy, how wrong was she?  Paul McCartney is the most successful songwriter alive or dead…by virtue of the amount of money made on his music.  Quick…who wrote the “Blue Danube Waltz”?  You get the gold star if you said Austrian composer Johann Strauss II in 1866, but I doubt that many of you had the answer.

Songs are time machines.  Better than Dr. Who’s Tardis, (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), songs catapult the listener back in time to an exact second in life.  You immediately picture what you were doing, smell your surroundings and experience the emotions you were having when you heard that song.  You remember the instant you first fell in love, your first kiss, or the moment your lover ripped your heart out of your chest, threw it to the ground and stomped all over it…in cleats!  Music has great power…songs have great power.  They can make you laugh or cry, be happy or sad, boost you up or take you down.

With something so powerful, shouldn’t we protect it?  I heard this week of another big Nashville publisher having to let go of some employees.  More jobs lost and not replaced in our business.  There are only a few major record labels left here in TuneTown…such a loss.  Not only for the friends who are now unemployed, but for the loss of new songs and the memories they will evoke to someone down life’s road.  Downloading songs for free…downlooting, or stealing if you prefer, is hurting us all:  the record companies, the artists, the musicians, the producers, the studios, the engineers, the songwriters.  Sure, there is music all over the Internet, and every garage band out there can make their own CD and sell it at their concerts, but not many have the knowledge or the money to really promote that music to the world.  Not many can make their song a hit so that many people hear it, and it throws the listener back in time.

As a writer, I am fortunate to be able to live in my fantasies.  And, I’ve got a photographic memory.  I can be in another place in seconds, just by hearing a song.

So, back to the story…still in the ’60s, and another regular Sunday night with the family sitting around the TV and watching the weekly Ed Sullivan Show again.  The pop group, Gary Puckett And The Union Gap, came on and sang, “Woman, Woman.”  We watched as they performed that song and “Young Girl,” dressed in Civil War Uniforms in glorious black and white.  I was smitten.  Later that summer, and still in high school, I wanted to go to Central Park, NYC, to see the group in concert.  It was only a half hour trip by bus into the city, but my Mom still wouldn’t let me go see them.  She mumbled something about being too young to start those shenanigans.  I was crushed and had to miss The Union Gap‘s concert, unlike the other 100,000 people who came out to watch them play.  All through college, I followed their music, but was never close enough to go see them again.  But, like all happy endings…years later…through a mutual friend and a blind date, I met and married the group’s bass player!  We’ve been making music together for 25 years.  Guess I showed her.

SONGWRITERS ARE SONGWRITERS EVERYWHERE

Last week I was in Toronto, Canada, as a guest speaker at the Music Row North Seminar, and I headlined two shows at the Tin Pan North Music Festival. Toronto…what a huge city…I had no idea! Three things were made perfectly clear: Toronto has eight months of winter and four months of road construction; gas prices are sky high ($1.89 a LITER, multiply that by 4 and you roughly have the price per gallon…they pay tax on TAX!!!); and songwriters are songwriters everywhere.

Songwriters…we all face the same problem: The Internet. Ah, that sweet blessing and that horrible curse. A blessing because it is so easy to get our songs heard worldwide, and a curse because it is so easy to get our songs heard worldwide…for free. Canadian songwriters are facing illegal downloads just like American songwriters are facing, and none of us are being paid for our music.

During the seminar, we heard the same concerns from our brothers and sisters to the North: how do we get our songs played, how do we make money from our creations, and how do we stop the stealing? During the song critique session of the seminar, it was clear that the next generation of Canadian songwriters is ripe with talent. The world is in for a treat, but only if they can support themselves with their music, which is getting harder and harder to do.

Music is everywhere on the Internet: You Tube, Pandora, PressPlay, Rhapsody Internet, XM Radio, Live 365, Project Playlist, Digital Audio services like PlayNet, Dish CD and Sirius XM and Digital Video outlets like Touchtunes, AMI Entertainment and E-cast. Songwriters are paid in MICRO PENNIES. Here’s an example. One of my songs, “You Go First (Do You Wanna Kiss),” was downloaded well over a 1000 times on Rhapsody Internet last quarter. That sounds great until you see that amount of downloads netted me $.25 (note the decimal point is to the LEFT of the numbers). Another song “I Meant To Do That” (#1 and Song Of The Year nomination in Canada), was downloaded well over 600 times last quarter, and I made $.07 (again, note the placement of the decimal point). That’s not $.07 per play…that is $.07 for all 682 plays. Awesome!

Before the Internet, songwriters were paid in full pennies for performances. The same songs, with the same number of plays, would net me over a hundred dollars if played on conventional radio. Add up all of my songs, played on conventional radio each quarter, and I could have a moderate income…enough to live on and write another day. As it stands now, with only 1 out of every 30 songs downloaded being paid for (the other 29 are stolen), those micro pennies net me a cup of coffee…if I don’t go to Starbucks.

So, what do we do? We appeal to you, the consumer. Please do the right thing and don’t steal our music, our creations, our livelihood. We want to make a living doing what we love, and I’m sure you want to continue hearing great music from songwriters around the world because, after all, songwriters are songwriters everywhere…and you, wherever you are, can be the solution.



Tuning up before the show


 

Introducing the next song



Singing In Toronto





Kerry Chater, Lynn Gillespie Chater, Summer March, Andy Kim

 


NSAI-Toronto Tin Pan North Music Festival

First time in Toronto. Headlining two shows for NSAI-Toronto Tin pan North Music Festival. Friday night Trane Studios 7:30 pm. Saturday night the Eton House 7:30 pm. Come see me, eh!
So excited to be here!