Feedback from PRS members

[odie76]

I’m hoping to get some feedback from PRS affiliated composers about receiving royalties from placements in the U.S. and Canada.

I’ve had music placed on shows in these countries, with my first placements probably being on MTV’s Catfish season 4 which started being broadcast in February 2015. I haven’t received my first PRS check yet, and I know it can take a long time for overseas royalties to come through, but I hope it might happen soon. Is there anything I should be doing to try to facilitate this? I don’t know if I’m supposed to obtain cue sheets, for example.

All of these placements are of re-titled works, and these new titles do not appear in my PRS account. Is this a problem? After many phone calls and emails to PRS, the publishers and other PRO’s, I still haven’t figured out how to get these titles into my account.

PRS told me that I needed to ask the publishers to send a request to their PRO to ‘send fiches of the works registered with them to our International Department so that those works can be included on our database’. When I spoke to the publishers about this, none of them had heard about this before. I also got contradictory information when I spoke to BMI, and SOCAN said that they weren’t prepared to do it because they’re too many titles.

Do I need these titles to be in my PRS account in order to receive royalties?

Thanks.

[Matt Foster]

Hi, i can’t answer your question about whether or not your tracks will be collecting from abroad sorry. I can tell you unfortunately I have had a similar experience with PRS, and my experience with dealing with the member services at PRS wasn’t good at all…

I had a situation where my tracks with an overseas publisher were not listed in my PRS list of works – which was odd at the time because I had a bunch of tracks with the same publisher that did show up.. Anyways it got to the point, after lots of frustration in dealing with PRS, where I had to make a complaint with PRS and subsequently send a public tweet directly to their twitter profile to get some action – and I am normally a guy who doesn’t do that kind of thing… Anyways, after that oddly the tracks showed up in my PRS database of works, and have been collecting ever since.

My advice is to try and get some form of tune code or reference from the local PRO where it was published, and query that info with PRS – and don’t let them palm you off!!

Good luck and I hope you get it sorted out.

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