ASCAP marks 100th year with 2014 Centennial Awards

Nothing like celebrating a centennial anniversary with something new.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, better known as ASCAP, will mark its 100th year as a performance-rights organization Monday night with the ASCAP Centennial Awards, the first fundraiser for The ASCAP Foundation. The star-studded gala at the Waldorf Astoria will honor the first Centennial Award winners -- Joan Baez, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, Stephen Sondheim and Stevie Wonder -- and help fund scholarships, workshops and other programs to aid future generations of songwriters.

"With these amazing stars onstage, it's a chance to honor the work that has gone before," says Paul Williams, ASCAP's president and chairman, calling from Nashville. However, the organization's centennial celebration also points out how much more work there is to do, especially in the currently tumultuous times of the music industry.

"The music industry is growing," Williams says. "There's more music being played more often than ever before on more amazing devices. The area where it's out of sync is in the digital world. There's some sort of a weird process that people think music goes through when you translate it into zeros and ones that it filters the value out of the music."

Williams points to the fact that 72 million streams of a song on Pandora in 2011 yielded the songwriters only $1,500. It's the same debate that led Taylor Swift to take her songs off Spotify at the height of her popularity earlier this month. "Music is changing so quickly and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," Swift told Yahoo! "And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

Williams says ASCAP is working to change the rates songwriters get paid by music services, but the laws need to be updated to reflect the times.

"We've been operating under a consent decree that was created in 1941," says Williams, adding that the decree was born one year after he was. "It was last modified before the iPod was even created."

For Williams -- best known for the hits he wrote or co-wrote, including "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "Evergreen," though he just won this year's album of the year Grammy for his work on Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories" -- the fight for ASCAP and for songwriters is personal.

"The thought that 100 years ago, a bunch of songwriters got together and said, 'Hey, there's a way that we can collectively license our works' that translated in my life, when I joined ASCAP in 1972, into all these years of food on the table and gas in the car and a daughter who is a licensed clinical social worker . . . that's reason enough for me to dedicate my life to ASCAP today," Williams says. "It's been the single greatest honor of my life."

WHAT The ASCAP Centennial Awards

WHEN | WHERE 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, Waldorf Astoria New York, 301 Park Ave., Manhattan

INFO $1,000-$50,000; 914-579-1000, nwsdy.li/ASCAPcentennial

A look at the award's first recipients 

The recipients of the ASCAP Centennial Awards, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the performance rights organization, were chosen for what the group calls "their incomparable accomplishments in their respective music genres and beyond." Here's a look at the honorees, with the help of ASCAP chairman Paul Williams:

Joan Baez

BIO She debuted at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and became a teenage folk sensation in 1960 on the strength of her versions of "House of the Rising Sun" and "Silver Dagger."

BIGGEST SONG "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (No. 3, 1971)

CHOSEN FOR "She's a leading voice of the folk revival, as a lifelong champion of social justice and somebody whose voice, like Dylan's, I heard as I marched through the '60s, looking for the kind of change we were looking for in those days," Williams says.

Garth Brooks

BIO The biggest-selling solo artist of all time, Brooks dominated country music and then made country music the dominant genre in the latter half of the '90s.

BIGGEST SONG "Friends in Low Places" (No. 1 country, four weeks, 1990)

CHOSEN FOR "I would call Garth a friend," Williams says. "He has done more for music, not only as an artist, but as a philanthropist. . . . He has that kind of a heart."

Billy Joel

BIO The Hicksville native's greatest hits is one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, and in 2014, 21 years after his last album, he will be one of the top-grossing touring acts of the year.

BIGGEST SONG "We Didn't Start the Fire" (No. 1, 2 weeks, 1989)

CHOSEN FOR "He is a part of our cultural landscape," Williams says. "You go anywhere in the world, in the worst of moods, and a Billy Joel song will be there being played and bounce you right back into something you can live with."

Stephen Sondheim

BIO The composer and lyricist behind legendary Broadway shows from "West Side Story" to "Into the Woods" has won eight Tony Awards, eight Grammys and an Oscar.

BIGGEST SONG "Send in the Clowns" by Judy Collins (No. 19, 1977)

CHOSEN FOR "Before I had any idea that I was going to write music, I thought from his very earliest efforts, the 'West Side Story' days . . . there is no one like Stephen Sondheim," Williams says. "I have nothing but love, love, love and respect for him."

Stevie Wonder

BIO One of Motown's biggest stars, the teenage star grew into one of R&B's grandest standard-bearers with masterworks like "Songs in the Key of Life" and pop standards.

BIGGEST SONG "I Just Called to Say I Love You" (No. 1, 3 weeks, 1984)

CHOSEN FOR "When you think about all the music that came out of Detroit . . . that R&B that goes all the way around the world, it cannot be defined in any way except brilliant," Williams says. "Stevie Wonder is that, as well as an amazing humanitarian worthy of recognition."