Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Tough question. Sometimes tracks sit for years then get lots of placements. Sometimes tracks sit for years and get no placements. If you signed 100 tracks and none were placed you should probably move on. If you signed 5, it’s hard to say. Also, given royalty lag time, you could have year 2 placements that haven’t appeared on your royalty statement yet.
I’d definitely pull them after 6 years though!
Hope you get lots of placements right away and your decision gets easy.
I pay for it.
Lots of their shows run for years. I’ve had many placements in the $20-$70 range after several years of reruns. And a few that paid just a couple bucks.
Well, the number of pages is certainly increasing!
International was higher than ever. I’m not sure why. If there’s a pattern to international, I’m not sure what it is. Netflix was higher for me too.
I might agree that royalties are softening overall, but I’m not sure. My royalties grow, but not dramatically, and the size of my catalog increases more than the size of my royalties.
A few observations, and maybe these are obvious: International takes a long time to start, then continues for a long time. Movies keep generating for years. Placements on network shows are still great. More streaming royalties come online with each statement; payments are small but growing and not insignificant.
I’m not sure how the royalty rate per viewer for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu et. al. compares to the rate for network and cable. Yes, the payments are small, but viewership is often very small as well. If anyone has numbers on that, I’d love to know.
It’s all over the place. 1-20 hours. I don’t see any correlation between number of hours spent and likelihood of placement. Some just take longer than others. Of course it’s always worth my time to spend enough hours to do my best work. I work faster if I’m specific about how I want the track to sound before I start. I can always change my mind after I start if that seems like the thing to do.
Yes, a template can save some time. And if you’ve already chosen a palette, you have fewer decisions to make, and that can help.
If it’s a genre that’s new or newish to me, the first track may take 2-4x as long to produce but it’s worth taking the time to get the sound you want. It’s efficient and educational to make at least 2-3 tracks in that genre.
My experience is similar to many of your experiences. “Feels like a stock that won’t break out” is a good description. My income does always increase year over year, but not by a lot. My catalog seems to be growing faster than my income.
I’m not seeing a decline in royalty payment per placement on network and cable. It’s still great to get network placements.
Royalty payments for shows produced by Amazon and Netflix are in the range of some medium paying cable placements, not in the range of network placements.
Yes, a few pages of Hulu pay in the low hundreds, etc. Amazon VOD placements with 300 or 4000 or 18,000 streams pay pennies. Amazon VOD placements with 500K-1M streams pay $10-25. I’m not sure how these numbers compare to royalties for a cable rerun seen by the same number of viewers. (Lower or much, much lower…)
My overall Blanket payments have been down for a couple quarters but, like many things on these statements, I can’t figure out if that’s fluke or trend.
Best of luck to all of you in this crazy business.With BMI I now get this garbage when I click on “works catalog”.
“This catalog is too large to display. Please enter your search criteria.”
Oddly enough, you can still see your entire catalog without logging in to your account by using the “search BMI repertoire” function and entering your name as songwriter/composer.
My guess is not for while. Cause I believe there is a long arc on a lot of this. Like stacking up episodes that recur. That takes a while and if the hypothetical composer waits and slams the 1000 tunes up it will still take some time for the episodes to accumulate. I know sometimes tunes just sit there for years before being picked for something. … it seems better to me to go ahead an get the tunes working as soon as possible.
This is consistent with my experience. Some tracks are unused for 3 or 4 years, then used often.
Or, another way of looking at it: Tracks I produced/signed in 2013/2014 outearned tracks I produced/signed in 2015/2016 on my most recent PRO statement.I’ve had a Tunesat account for years. Here’s my experience:
If the wrong show title (or no show title) is displayed initially, it usually corrects in a day or two.
If Tunesat detects a promo or commercial, it will display the title of the show in which the promo/commercial airs. That’s pretty easy to figure out though. If the same track and length is detected during several different shows in the same day, it’s probably a commercial or promo.
I haven’t noticed any significant change over time in the percentage of placements that are detected. I would estimate that 15 to 25 percent of my placements are detected, and often only a portion of the placement is captured. I only track US TV placements.
It IS perplexing to me that this service detects so few placements. I know I’ve seen posts on MLR reporting that some composers have a much higher detection percentage than me. I can’t figure that out.
I still choose to pay for the service though. When deciding what music to produce, it’s very useful to know what is being placed ASAP, and I’m not aware of an alternative to Tunesat. Customer service is good and the interface is easy to use.
Roughly 1-2 years and 100-200 tracks before PRO payments started. Then another 5-6 quarters before quarterly payments passed $1K. That was roughly 4 years ago and payments have grown steadily. Of course, I’m continuing to produce music.
It’s a long term enterprise for sure.
It can be corrected. The amount you were erroneously paid will be deducted from a future statement.
50 percent means you co-wrote and split the writer’s share. 200 percent means you own the writer’s and the publisher’s share.
If you are bringing in musicians to record music you have written, you can treat it as a work for hire. You pay the musicians for the session, but they don’t participate in ownership or royalties.
I think you can find boilerplate WFH agreements online. Doesn’t hurt to speak with a music attorney of course. But the spirit of this kind of agreement is pretty straightforward.
In my experience, payments for original Netflix programs are similar to good cable placements and less than many network placements.
My BMI statements include many (2-3 pages) Netflix payments under $1 for streaming of shows that originated elsewhere, and much larger payments for streaming of very popular shows. I don’t know if that represents less royalties per view than other TV reruns.
Tunesat certainly doesn’t catch everything….but you can always use it as a guide for what tracks (and what type of tracks are getting placements, which library(ies) are they with, etc…
I think this is a great reason to use Tunesat. Tunesat detects only some of my placements, but information about what is being placed is useful.
You could save some money by tracking only US placements.