[frarob]

Your best resources are the website for the major administration societies - ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. If you are booked to perform in a commercial establishment such as a nightclub/bar, the club should have the proper public performance licenses in place. It is the establishment's responsibility, not the DJ, KJ, or band. There have been some statements posted that apply the "letter of the law" to a sublime end, such as playing a boom box in the park or on the beach without a license is a violation. By strict, literal interpretation, it is: so too is the slammed import hot rod with the booming "thump thump" stereo in the lane next to me at a traffic light that I can hear with my windows up and the news on the radio. As far as your library, if it is a commercially released disc, you have no problem - see what I cut from the BMI website in a previous post. If it's a burned disc, the situation is a bit more grey in that you would need to prove that you owned a commercial copy and burned the disc as a backup/safety. Downloaded tracks are more difficult to establish chain of ownership, which is really the bottom line: did you buy the track in either a physical form or through download, or was it "borrowed", meaning most likely burned at no cost and therefore no royalty paid to the songwriter or the studio that owns the accompanyment track. Even if you burn safeties of your catalog, I would suggest that the burned discs be the archive copy and the commercial discs be the performance discs to avoid that potential frustration.