Music Licensing Inc (SONG)

[MusicExec]

Thanks for sharing

According to the link below the average annual salary of a dance studio owner is between $33k and $43k with the lowest being around $16k per annum

https://dancerents.com/how-much-do-dance-studio-owners-make/

This kind of puts the recurring $12 million annual basic salary Jake has awarded himself into perspective

Assuming this is a normal small dance studio owner earning $16k to $43k and not an owner of a major chain of dance studios personally I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if a member of my team had charged them $20,000 for a one year proforma SONG PRO licence let alone $100,000 for a five year contract assuming the contract was on the basis of the proforma SONG PRO licence you shared

In the past we did bespoke music projects for certain small businesses (at their request) where the small business was seeking their own unique specially composed music catalog and their own specially recorded music which over 5 years might have grown to $100,000 of expenditure for satisfied customers based on mutually agreed terms and staged progress payments hence $100,000 of unpaid invoices never built up on such bespoke music projects.

Do you know anything about the size of the dance studio being licensed here or if they were getting a lot more than an off the shelf standard SONG PRO licence for $100,000 ?

Whereas a 5 year PRO agreement is often negotiated by a professional and knowledgeable music user with significant scale (on their terms) such as a big TV broadcaster or a major global platform such as YouTube I have personally never heard of small business owners asking for 5 year minimum terms on $100,000 contracts with no break clauses

Sadly I suspect the dance studio won’t be able to pay the $100,000 that SONG is seeking through the courts nor sadly I suspect will SONG be able to pay Jake the $12 million recurring annual basic salary he awarded himself (with the approval of his board)

I seem to recall that other PRO’s such as ASCAP use an independent arbitration process rather than the court process to resolve misunderstandings with their customers

What were the other SONG board members thinking when they signed off Jake’s $12m plus employment agreement given the operating cash flow history of SONG ?

As a benchmark, according to Digital Music News in April 2020 the salary of ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews was believed to be in the low 7-figure range which is presumably a lot closer to $1m than $12 million.

Unlike SONG which I understand has 1 or maybe 2 employees, ASCAP is a big organisation and has over 600 employees so I speculate purely as an outsider with little knowledge of SONG that a better benchmark for a professional CEO of SONG might be at (or below) the average ASCAP executive compensation of circa. $216,053 a year

[ source : https://www.comparably.com/companies/ascap/executive-salaries ]