Bob,

This is just a bit of playing catch up to ASCAP, who has had their "ASCAP Awards" program for about 20 years. They have been doing it for a long time. It is also to respond to people who are going "Exactly why am I a member of BMI?" Because they are not paying out as much money as they used to. Both BMI and ASCAP are finding themselves more and more irrelevant as music goes more to "Free."

You could try to "pad" all kinds of things and cheat but you would only be cheating yourself, and like all things, it is more of an averaging than an actually "dollar to performance" ratio.

They might come and audit the clubs you work for and see if they pay their liscencing fees and of course that could result in what many clubs have done, shut down live music completely.

But the venues supposedly have already paid liscencing fees for the songs they play.

As in all things music, there are no exactitudes. It is all formulas, and all averaged out. Play a lot, you might get paid more than people who don't play a lot. If you were playing in venues that pay liscencing fees, it would be no harder than looking at their calendars to find out if you were telling the truth or not. If you lied, you would find it fairly uncomfortable.

MAB