 Competing against the strongly established ASCAP, BMI sought out artists that ASCAP tended to overlook or ignore.BMI also purchased the rights to numerous catalogs held by independent publishers or whose ASCAP contracts were about to expire.To attract newer writers, BMI proposed to compensate songwriters and publishers on the basis of a fixed fee per performance, as opposed to ASCAP's two-tier system which discriminated against less-established songwriters.