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Definitely B and don’t worry about it, if it generates any significant income money, perhaps offer your friend some money to sign off on it to get the release signed. But a verbal agreement is also an agreement so buy him a cup of coffee and be done with it.
Basically, there are two options:
A.You either move all your (legacy) works with you to the new PRO (You get one check from BMI)
B You leave all legacy works with ASCAP and only your new works goes to BMI (Basically after a certain date when you are all BMI). (You get two checks; one from ASCAP for your legacy works and one BMI check for new works or the ones you decided to move over to BMIDepending on your catalog ex if you have a Hit song perhaps ASCAP pay better (?) then leave that song at ASCAP then move your Production Music Instrumentals to BMI.
What would make me a little worried (my own theory) in A. would be in the scenario where you have a ASCAP publisher collecting for your ASCAP writer share but once that work goes to BMI how would the publisher collect unless getting them involved to update their records with the PRO too?….
Whenever works are “questionable” they go into to the unclaimed royalties black box (Which the PRO gets unless claimed) and I’m worried a switch to BMI from an ASCAP writer would put the works in the “Black Box quarantine”. Also if publisher forgets to update their records etc…… I think I would go with option B just to avoid that to be sure…After 7-8 years of steady back-end income from library music, predictable within $1-2K every quarter (which has been my main source of income) this year it’s sunken 50%. I thought it might have something to do with the dollar being overall weaker ex if the PRO collects fewer dollar fees (from overseas) in a particular year it will drag everyone income down too? Or that BMI changed the rules in 2015 on how they pay royalties (counting view ship per show)?
Ironically enough I was expecting this to be my best year as I have more music out there than ever.
Kinda feels like I got fired but hopefully, it will pick back up next quarter if it goes down I guess I got to look into other markets or (professions).
LA Writer bring up many eye opening and scary points. Perhaps it’s just the end of the back end era.
Re PROs
Have anyone with ongoing regular placements in cable experience with switching from BMI to Sesac? How is Sesac paying in comparison for back end royalties (cable) to BMI? (I know Ascap is worse for back end cable so I’m not switching to them).
Although BMI has been good to me in the past, I’ve always felt left out when it comes to customer service and transparency. Customer service at BMI seems only to involve being redirect to an answering machine.Stay away from Tunecore, that admin deal is exclusive and they basically just collect an admin fee for doing nothing, There have been many comparisons charts out there on companies like that, just google it but I’de go with CD baby over Tunecore but there might be better ones depending on your needs.
Standard delivery for TV is 16-48k, same as Post audio specs like SFX and dialog. That’s the closest thing to a standard I’ve seen in broadcast. Dub mixer’s format is usually 48k so if u del;over 44.1 it will be Resampled when it goes into the Re Recorder’s session. All this 24 bit stuff is often sales tools used by the same people who will ask you how to convert a MP3 into a 24 bit 48k wave file ha ha ha. I’ve noticed that libraries who deals with mostly single drop licensing is often 16.44.1 and broadcast backend bulk libraries are often 16 48.
My master format is 16b 48k
Just my 2 cent.Make 1.5-2.00 min instrumental edits and use those for libraries then save the full length vocal version for the publishers. In 6-7 years when the vocal versions are starting to sound dated and still haven’t gone anywhere you can add those as well 🙂
Did you sign any Schedule A/Exhibit A s for the specific cues?
Did other cues you submitted AFTER these cues already appear in the online library?
Considering it’s only been since late 2015 and if these was the LATEST cues you submitted and I would chill for a while. It’s very common for a library to go months before updating their catalogs, some of the biggest ones only update their catalogs once or twice a year. I did a group of cues for a big library which I delivered August 2014 but it was just released in April 2016 but they paid me a nice upfront fee for the cues which I got right away so I don’t care.
I also knew a library who once didn’t update their online library for 1.5 years, they were still distributing via hard drives but even if they didn’t that’s up to them. Sometimes libraries have major programing projects going on or other higher priorities than updating their catalogs which is often the least important aspect of publishing music.If the missing cues are NOT the latest cues and you didn’t sign any paper work for those cues and the newer submitted cues appear in their online library and the first letter in the Library name starts with an “S”, I would assume they passed on those cues.
Then I would just shoot them en email saying something like ” Since those (name the cues) cues are missing from your online library and I didn’t get any Schedule A/ Exhibit A to sign I herby assume you guys passed on those so I’m just letting you know I intend to use them for other purposes. Please advise if this is not the case.Just make it real easy for them to reply and stop you if you can’t use them elsewhere.
Also keep in mind that the person you’re emailing might have been told by the boss to only answer important emails from clients or to do sales or fix registration or only answer emails from composers who generate the library lots of income. This might seem unfair but many of these libraries have only 1-5 people working for them managing 100s of composers and if all of them write emails a few times a month, that might cost the library $5000 extra in salaries to their employes per year just to answer those emails, so always make sure u do anything you can to answer your own question before contacting them.
If it the same library I think it is, it’s also very important how you formulate your question to them, make sure your email is no longer than a 2-3 line and super clear.
Just my 2 cents
Interesting, can you give a ballpark dollar figure on how much it would be to set up a will like that?
Personally I think it’s pretty lame to use this forum which was started to be a resource for ALL members, to hook up with other members and only share info privately. Also it might undercut the fees Art are able to collect to maintain the site which is not fair. In fact I wouldn’t mind if the whole PM function on this site would be disabled or at least for non paying members. Not accusing you guys of trying to do this but it might be the end result. Just my 2 cents.
No, I doubt that’s gonna do much for you. This business is realitonship based and beside you can probably dig up that info in that book via the internet using sites like this http://variety411.com/us/los-angeles/ but again I know where Capitol Records are located but doesn’t mean anyone is gonna listen to my stuff just because I drop off my demo at the Capitol Records building.
I can’t get over how amazing it is that Mark Lewis has shared this software for free with us. Hats off to you sir!
15-20% of writers seems fair, most likely the library would take 100% of the publishing.
It’s basically a commission based sales deal.
Your time spent middle managing it between the library and the bands are the investment for which you collect the fee in form of writers share. Of course the possibility of having wasted time on this also comes back to you and your judgement. Not sure how fair the deal would be if you didn’t have to put a little work into it.
Just do it non exclusive and re-title as a way top say out of other versions of their songs. if they sign a record deal later they can keep their original title for that, the library can pull out the re-title (the audio) and not pitch it further but can still collect from previous placements on cue sheets under the re titleTo have the artists and bands pay you a fee would be a hard sell for music library deals, that’s more of a song plugging deals where they are pitching songs to big artists ex Tim McGraw or Reba and some song writers pay cash fees to be part of regardless of results.
Don’t worry too much about getting into a exclusive library later, these guys wanna be rock stars and probably don’t care much about not being able to sign with Jingle Punks Exclusive versus Crucial anyway.
I wonder how that would work for BMI writers who has co writers with foreign PROs then ? I guess for safety it’s probably best to tell Libraries to make sure they use their BMI entities to collect for a foreign PRO co writer in those cases. I know some libraries default to their ASCAP publishing entities on foreign PRO writers so probably best to request it.