Ralph Jackson (BMI Assistant Vice President, Classical Music Relations; President, the BMI Foundation; and Director of the BMI Student Composer Awards) was a guest speaker at a music student forum hosted by the Composition faculty of the University of Miami Frost School of Music on Friday, September 17, 2010.
Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) collects license fees from businesses that use music, which it distributes as royalties to songwriters, composers & music publishers. Jackson works at BMI headquarters in New York City.
At his workshop, Jackson provided Frost School of Music students with invaluable insights about the function of a performing rights organization for composers and authors, focusing on his specialty area of classical music. Students asked far-reaching questions ranging from international rights management, blanket licenses, and registering copyrights, to practical matters of how rights organizations collect and distribute royalties to their members.
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Formed in 1939 as a non-profit-making performing right organization, BMI was the first to offer representation to songwriters of blues, country, jazz, r&b, gospel, folk, Latin and, ultimately, rock & roll.
BMI was founded by radio executives to provide competition in the field of performing rights, to assure royalty payments to writers and publishers of music not represented by the existing performing right organization and to provide an alternative source of licensing for all music users. BMI will distribute more than $789 million in royalties for its 2010 fiscal year to the songwriters, composers and copyright owners it represents.
Ralph Jackson, BMI Assistant VP, Classical Music Relations, Conducts Composition Workshop at Frost
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL 33124
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