Sony/ATV Music Publishing — whose catalog includes Beatles classics along with Taylor Swift’s current chart toppers — plans to dump the industry’s oldest and biggest performance-rights organizations by the end of the year, […] Bypassing Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) and American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP), which collect royalties for songwriters when their tunes are played on the radio, streamed online or piped into a store, would allow Sony/ATV to negotiate directly with services such as Pandora, Spotify and YouTube. […] Sony/ATV already tried a partial pullout from the professional-rights organizations, forcing companies like Pandora to negotiate directly for a license to stream music. Pandora sued, arguing that music publishers couldn’t make partial withdrawals from BMI and ASCAP, which are bound by decades-old consent decrees with the The United States Department of Justice that determine royalty rates. – Richard Morgan,New York Post 

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