ASCAP and their inadequate survey system

[Kubed]

@Alan & Michael Nicholas: i have 100+ hits on NBA since 2016.Never saw a penny from these placements and i’m with BMI. Haven’t contacted BMI regarding this but i take it some sports networks pay peanuts and PRO’s just don’t bother to collect these royalties.

[Michael Nickolas]

Thanks Kubed, misery loves company. 🙂

[Alan]

If it makes you feel any better, I have 90 cue sheets for these types of placements. I sent ASCAP a document listing the Series Title, Series Code, Date, and Program Code from each cue sheet and got the same nonsense from them as you did.

Nah, I don’t feel better, just worse for you and Kubed.
pgbanker, thanks for the great info. Please continue to share this process and your progress.

I probably will not make the change. In my frustration failed to mention that I have hit the survey “lottery” a few times. I have gotten the occasional 3 figure payout from small cable channels for survey hits. Does that make up for lost royalties? Who knows? The NBA channel is using one of my tracks a lot, so my odds are improving. I’ll report back if I get lucky with the survey.

I will say that I was much happier about my royalties before I had a Tunesat account, haha.

[LAwriter]

but i take it some sports networks pay peanuts and PRO’s just don’t bother to collect these royalties.

Oh they COLLECT. Now payout as you have seen is another matter. But you can be assured that all the PRO’s collect. How much they collect is a shrouded mystery though, so it’s hard to know how much we are losing.

[Vlad]

This is such a terrible thread. So much work is done to craft professional tracks and pound the pavement to get them in the right hands for a placement. Then bam! No money. Maybe I’m short sighted, but there just can’t be another industry where a professional product is being used by a client and the party responsible for collecting the money is just flat out failing (in some cases, not all).

[Music1234]

You guys motivated me to look at statements and I can confirm that I have cue sheets for “NBA Gametime” but have not been paid ASCAP royalties for Q 4 2017 plays nor Q1 2018 plays.

I did get royalties for “NBA Gametime” from BMI and some do pay well $32, $17 , $19 for background instrumentals.

So yes indeed, ASCAP is not paying for NBA TV even though cue sheets are on file. This is very annoying and really just amounts to overt mismanagement of royalties collected. If BMI is collecting and paying for this program, why wouldn’t ASCAP?

[Anoeljr45]

I have a couple of hundred cues on the BigTen Network sports channel and haven’t been paid. Here is the response I received from ASCAP. What’s the use of sending in cue sheets if ASCAP dosen’t acknowledge them?

BTN is a sample survey station and a random 6 hour sample is conducted for that station each quarter. Anything that falls into that random sample survey receives royalties. This survey is based on the license fee that BTN pays to ASCAP. While you may have a number of cue sheets for programs on this station, if the program does not fall into the sample survey done for the station, then the performances are not eligible for royalties.

[Alan]

BTN is a sample survey station and a random 6 hour sample is conducted for that station each quarter. Anything that falls into that random sample survey receives royalties. This survey is based on the license fee that BTN pays to ASCAP. While you may have a number of cue sheets for programs on this station, if the program does not fall into the sample survey done for the station, then the performances are not eligible for royalties.

And yet, now 30+ pages of my statement is devoted to internet and streaming royalties that ad up to about $10. ASCAP will boast how they pay us $0.00045 for HULU streams, but uses a 24 hour sample to determine an entire years’s worth of Royalties on a cable channel for ALL ASCAP writers. So much for the “Music Modernization Act.”

I’m thinking of writing a letter to the ASCAP board of directors complaining about this. Of course it won’t do any good, but I will include a link to this thread so they know we are noticing and talking about their failure. I’ll have to “cool off” before I do it, and I’m not a very good professional writer. Anyone know a music lawyer out there who would draft a letter on our behalf, pro bono? 😉

[MichaelL]

So much for the “Music Modernization Act.”

The MMA has nothing to do with Cable TV. It involves interactive Digital Music Providers (streaming) and digital downloads of music. More specifically, it covers “non-dramatic” musical works, which is generally understood to mean works not incorporated into other productions, like TV shows and films, etc.

I switched from ASCAP to BMI in 2011 because, at the time, I had 140K performances per year of syndicated non-network TV theme music (still only paying pennies per). Cue sheets and air dates were provided to ASCAP by the producer, all of which was easily verifiable. ASCAP, of course, insisted on its survey and missed 70-75% of the performances. BMI was much better at detecting and counting the performances, but then they changed their royalty calculation to include show ratings and my payout dropped 75%. So, for that situation it was perhaps a wash.

The process pgbanker described is fairly accurate. BMI was great at transferring my catalog, even finding decades-old tracks that I’d long forgotten about. With the exception of having to wait for the windows to line up, the process was seamless and there were no missed payments because of the switch.

[Michael Nickolas]

FWIW I’ve read that SESAC doesn’t use survey like ASCAP or sampling like BMI but relies on cue sheets.

[Author]

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