so lately a bunch of artists have been telling Donald Trump to stop using their music at his rallies and as somebody who loves music and copyright law this is very interesting to me Isaac Hayes Sinead O Connor Celine Dion all have had to tell Donald Trump to stop using their music at his rallies recently he’s gotten in a spat with Foo Fighters over using their song My Hero at a recent campaign stop in Arizona and the band came out and said No he did not have our permission and this time the Trump campaign actually pushed back and said that they did have permission to use that song and I’ve already seen a bunch of incorrect information about this out there so I wanted to just make a quick video clearing some things up so the first thing is what kind of license do you need to play music in public in the first place and that is a license under copyright law called a public performance license so in order to play music in public a restaurant a bar a sports arena you do need permission from the copyright holder now unlike say putting a song in a movie or sampling a song it’s not really practical to go to the artist every time you want a license to play their song in public people can’t be going to Michael Buble every time they wanna play one of his songs in a grocery store so artists use a performing rights organization to handle this for them there are a few of them but the two biggest are BMI and ASCAP Foo fighters and the song My Hero happen to be covered by BMI so establishments will pay these companies a blanket license so that they can play basically whatever music they want in their establishment now there’s some exceptions to this but yes for the most part an establishment like an arena does need a license to play music in public that leads me to the next incorrect thing I’ve seen some people say and that is that these venues that Donald Trump is speaking at they already have these licenses they would have these anyway and so that would cover whatever music that he wants to play at his rallies but that’s not true there is specifically an exception for political rallies for just this reason so you don’t have somebody who you don’t wanna be identified with using your music and making it seem like you’re endorsing them so if you go to the BMI website and you go to get a license there’s specifically a political license that you have to get for a political rally now I don’t know if this is the license that Donald Trump got the independent said that they saw that there was a license from BMI but they didn’t specify whether it was this specific political license I haven’t seen anybody show any evidence of that but maybe they did maybe some BMI representative really messed up and authorized the usage of this song and granted the license there is still an exception in there that if the artist raises an objection they can revoke the license so if this license was granted and they were given permission it did not come directly from the Foo Fighters it would have been somebody at BMI but now it’s pretty clear that the Foo Fighters are revoking that authorization if it ever existed