Royalties for Canadian Cable TV show

[euca]

Has anyone ever had a theme song on Discovery Canada or a similar Canadian cable channel?

I am a US composer and have a theme on a Discovery Canada TV show, today I received an ascap international statement which included this show. It aired 4th quarter 2016. 11 episodes.

My statement only showed 7 episodes with pretty low royalties.

Just curious if anyone has a ballpark figure for this type of placement?

I know this program repeated many times and the royalties just don’t seem to add up. Maybe Socan lags behind a quarter, not really sure.

Ascap international statements only give the name of the show, what episode and the royalty. So it makes it tough to know what is what.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[MaLmusic]

I’m with SOCAN, and as a member, I can see how much money you should get for placements on every Canadian networks.

According to the “Royalty calculator”, 1 minute of theme music on Discovery should give you $13.24, but that includes the publishing pie, so it’s $6.62 for the writer.

So if your team is actually 20 seconds, and you only own the writer’s share, then you would make $2.20 per airing. That equals to $1.73 in US money as of right now.

I also have access to the performance data, so I could tell you how many times and when the show aired if needed.

But yeah, sometimes they’re 1 quarter behind.

[euca]

Thank you!! That is just what I was looking for.

I wish ascap had some in depth access to royalties like it seems Socan does.

I guess the remaining 4 episodes were missed, I’ll wait to see if they show up on the next statement, but the information you provided really helped!!

Thanks again!

[MaLmusic]

No problems! Sometimes SOCAN does miss some airings, I guess those things can happen with any PRO. But overall, they’re quite transparent and reliable.

[Author]

Posts