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Gone on mine too. I just looked.
@ David. What I’m actually saying is that the re-title (the actual words of the title) of a track would “age out” in a fingerprinting scenario. Picture the scenario both MichaelL and I have been imagining out loud here. If the PROs adopt finger-printing (I don’t think that they have any incentive to figure out a watermarking scenario that just allows for a different type of digital age re-titling, but who knows… it would be a nice solution) then all of the retitle libraries (that focus on TV) would let all of their non-exclusive contracts go and purge their databases of re-titled tracks b/c they would have zero interest in keeping all of the non-exclusive tracks in their system for their clients to use and not get paid for them. Everything would go exclusive naturally. Therefore the “re-titles” (again, the actual words), not the musical styles, will die out of neglect – no one would want them or use them anymore because there would be no financial incentive left to do so.
Kenny, I don’t think anyone is saying that the PROs will suddenly stop paying for re-titled tracks (how would they even know the “original” from the “re-title” anyway?). What I am saying is that change will be gradual – an evolution over time of how they work. Basically, one day we are all going to wake up and when we register a new title at ASCAP or BMI we will be asked to upload the actual AUDIO of the track, which up to this point no PRO has ever asked for and doesn’t have on file AT ALL. (It’s going to be a blast to upload all of our audio into their databases…ugh)
That will be the beginning of the shift – everything going forward will be finger-printed, but everything prior to that date will be left as is and still paid royalties for re-runs, etc. But, when those re-runs and past re-title placements run their course, the new system of finger-printing will have supplanted the old system of cue sheets, etc. I think that it will be a hybrid approach for a long time, but eventually will change. You have to think about incentive and there isn’t a whole lot of incentive for it not to change. The production companies wouldn’t have to deal with cue sheets anymore, so they won’t complain, exclusive libraries won’t complain, non-retitling composers won’t complain, and the PROs wouldn’t have to deal with re-titling.
The only thing I can think that will slow it down is again a question of incentive: the PROs don’t really have a whole lot of incentive to quickly implement finger-printing when it’s going to be more expensive and open up other cans of worms, some unknowable and some that are easy to see, like if you have 5 libraries who have placed a single re-titled track (titles cease to mean anything b/c audio detection is all that is used) and you have no cue sheets, who gets the money? That is a painful transition that I’m sure the PROs aren’t in a hurry to face up to.
Again, I think it will all be gradual but I can’t see it not happening any more than I could imagine ASCAP never having transitioned out of a snail mail paper form system.
I think that the PROs would probably like for re-titling to go away because it is a pain with no gain for them. Kenny, since you haven’t re-titled yourself you might not have experienced this, but cues get mis-filed with the PROs (incorrect re-title publisher, for example) and have to be corrected by having the production co file corrected cue sheets and the PROs then correct that in their system. This all involves paperwork, time, phone calls, etc with no increased income for the PROs – just a shift of where the money goes. That can’t be very appealing to them as a long term issue.
If I had to guess I would say finger-printing would be phased in the same way the PRO digital databases ultimately replaced paper forms – they weren’t retroactive, but were simply a new way forward.
I agree with Art.
Assuming BMI is not getting more money from the cable channels and networks than ASCAP, I guess that they just dividing it up differently. If so, where is the ASCAP money going? To the bigger names, higher operating expenses, feature vocal performances, something else?
I’m with ASCAP and my placements are 90% cable (MTV, Bravo, etc) at least for now. Is that what we are talking about here that BMI seems to do better with than ASCAP? Just clarifying… MichaelL, I know you mentioned syndication and I didn’t know if that meant major network shows playing on channels that do a lot of re-running of old network shows, which would be a different deal I assume…
If you contact BMI will they actually analyze your placements and let you know if they would do better than ASCAP?
From my experience, even with cable it is pennies per play and _definitely_ not something that should be a gratis license. I would make sure that JP got an upfront license fee for it.
To you guys that already signed the exclusive deal: keep in mind that once you sign that you can no longer submit to them non-exclusively. Everything you submit from here on out is exclusive.
Steve speaks the truth. Nothing in my experience has shown that network placements automatically pay higher back-end than cable for all of the reasons he mentions and more. You’re kidding yourself if you think it’s as simple as network=bigger payouts. It has way more to do with the other numerous factors mentioned above and weighting systems of the PROs.
Very slow… RF sales are worse for me now than this same time last year by far – and that’s with more tracks in play than last year. My gut feeling is that it’s not a time of year thing, and therefore temporary, but the consequence of a flooded market that I doubt any of us can individually keep up with.
I agree with Steve.
I would like to know if they are going to continue gratis deals with an exclusive catalog, which they should actually be charging a premium for.
“Out of curiosity, how do you think composers can stop being “our own worst enemy”?”
One way to do it is to not go too far with with what the non-exclusive model encourages, which is to put the same tracks into a bunch of libraries willy nilly. It waters everything down in my opinion. I have done it in the past but have stopped, or at least treated non-exclusives that work for me a little more like exclusives and not send the same tracks everywhere.
Having your tracks in 10-20 different places can lead to real problems down the road, like if you have to remove one or more of them from multiple libraries because you have a good paying ad that requires exclusivity for a year, for example. Sometimes it’s not easy to make that happen and could potentially blow the deal.
With all due respect there is a lot of difference between the end user (editor) making a decision in 10 sec regarding whether something works for their particular project and the supplier of the music (library) listening to 10 seconds of an entire catalog that he plans to represent. Your mention of pizza led me to a restaurant example: there is a difference between the customer taking one bite of something to decide whether he likes it or not and the restaurant owner taking one bite of a chef’s food and hiring him to cook 100 items on a menu. People make (good) quick decisions all of the time, but factor in motive on this one – there is a motivation in the music library business to increase quantity. That’s the point I was making.
I personally wouldn’t do a deal with someone who is so unconcerned about the quality of their catalog that they wouldn’t listen for more than 10 seconds. That sounds like someone just trying to build up a “quantity over quality” library.