In the last few months I have been spending a lot of time analyzing my BMI statements, cue sheets, Tunesat reports and reconciling all of them. It’s a massive job with tons of detail but it’s nuts and bolts stuff and, like any business, it’s the details that matter. Fortunately BMI has been very helpful in making sure I get paid.
In digging through all of this I have been amazed at how much better sport placements, coupled with shows talking about sports, pay in performance royalties. Unlike many reality shows, which run on small networks with lower payouts and run times, sports talk placements run longer or at a higher rate. As an example we had numerous placements last year on various major league baseball shows. One network paid $5.04 for 20 seconds. Another paid $11.58 for 20 seconds. In one case they ran that cue for over two minutes, Ka-ching $78.16! Another sports network we were on had a much lower payout, about $0.60 per 15 seconds but it’s not unusual to see usage as high as 6 minutes at a time. Now BMI may be bundling the seconds together so it appears as they are running consistently but the point is the cues get used a lot.
In the above instances there were only two cues involved. One was a DnB version underscoring the importance of creating alternate mixes of all of your cues.
The take away is to don’t give up on any of your cues, you’ll never know when they might get discovered and where they might end up!
Here are samples of the two cues.
Ribs N Hip Hop-DnB
Hammerhead
Very interesting. It’s true that you never know where tracks will end up. I had one air thousands of times, each time was about $0.10. I took my girlfriend out for a 99 flake.
Edit: Ten 99 flakes
T’bone, HA! I know the feeling.
You must be in the UK. “Flake” as in Cadbury chocolates?
Haha, yes. It was an ice cream in a cone, with a flake in it.. used to be 99p. It’s so long since I’ve gone for ice cream that I don’t know if they still sell them.
I had a lot in Europe around the World cup this year swell as Fox sports and The Golf Channel.
Great post Art. I’ve been noticing a lot of usages of the same cues over and over on the cable sports networks as well. 6 min wow – haven’t had a usage that long yet…but that would be cool!
As I mentioned it’s could be BMI “bundling” seconds together as Tunesat doesn’t show anything that long. Then again the Tunesat detections run almost back to back in many cases.
Thanks for the informative post Art and especially for the helpful audio examples.
You are welcome Michael. Glad it was helpful.