[jdstamper]

White_Stripes … Very true. I’ve had international royalties take up to 3 years … and then its pennies.

Just this year I was denied some royalties because of late reporting somewhere in the food chain. That was a DOMESTIC placement and while I’m being paid for re-runs now, I didn’t get paid for the original prime time debut airing over 2 years ago, because BMI won’t make retro adjustments back that far.

Yep, the system is far from perfect and disappointment is part of the game. For me at least, it’s a challenge to anticipate which placements are likely to be bigger ones that you might want to ‘monitor’. The Telecinco placement is an unusual one for me so it made me more curious than hopeful.

[jdstamper]

How long did it take from the original airing until you saw the royalties?

I had a placement on the Telecinco network in Spain on a 2021 Christmas Eve live special, detected by Tunesat. I haven’t seen a payment yet in BMI. Being international, I didn’t really expect payment this “soon” … but I just learned about someone else with a similar placement in Spain and he saw the royalty on his last BMI statement (November 2022), so then I start to worry ?

[jdstamper]

Dannyc … In BMI most of my placements are longer than 15 seconds. In Tunesat most of my detections are less than 30 seconds.

[jdstamper]

White_Stripes … Agreed, I think of it as a bonus. That’s interesting about paid vs. unpaid – Thanks

Roscoe … Great question! I also wonder if BMAT has a free option like Tunesat. I see they have a free trial but I don’t know if it leads to a free account.

Dannyc … Interesting. I don’t have a huge amount of placements on Discovery or History or Syfy etc … but they’ve been regular royalties in BMI for years, and never a Tunesat detection.

[jdstamper]

White_Stripes … Yes, the channels button shows channels where I have placements, but Tunesat is not detecting … Discovery, the History Channel, Syfy, and others… And countries where I’m not getting detections as well.

[jdstamper]

My prior statement was less, but this one was back up to more typical level. I can never predict it, like this last statement had some “new” royalties from Christmas 2019 placements in the UK. I didn’t know about those placements and they show up in Spring 2021, go figure.

[jdstamper]

If you find out what happened, I hope you’ll be able to update us, as it’s very interesting. My initial thought was that the library was splitting a sync fee with you while BMI was maybe paying a back-end royalty. But it sounds like you believe both payments are back-end(?). Also I assume you were able to verify it’s for the exact same placement, not 2 different uses in the same show, and not 2 different episodes of the show, etc.. In any case, good luck to you! Jim

[jdstamper]

Being right-handed like most people, and driving on the right side of the rode like most of the world … I could really only operate this from the driver’s seat. Might as well just remove the steering wheel and other controls, they’ll only get in the way. Can I get 88 keys across the dashboard?

[jdstamper]

Will ASCAP, BMI and other PRO’s help to fight this?

[jdstamper]

Hey David, thanks for sharing the info

Not sure I understand, so this show was only streamed 7 times on Netflix? Is that a typo?

Are you able to share the name of the show?

I have a few tracks submitted to Netflix via a library but I haven’t seen a placement yet

[jdstamper]

The recent Blurred Lines court case unfortunately blurred the lines even more on what is covered by copyright.

Taxi doesn’t tell you to create sound likes, each Taxi listing has strong language against copying the references in any way, but to use the references as a general guide as to the genre. Taxi will often say you should create music that “could be heard on the same playlist” as the references.

[jdstamper]

Hey Michael, also congrats on all the placements! Jim

[jdstamper]

Thanks Art!

[jdstamper]

Thanks Happy Ears, yep I’ve been trying creative searches, just thought I might be missing some better source.

There are so many Tunesat users I was thinking many of them must be following up on missing royalties

It appears TV Guide will only search in the future, up to 14 days, which could be helpful for some shows

I’m trying not to spend a huge amount of time on this, it’s more of a learning experience to see how others do follow-ups, if at all

BMI hasn’t been much help but I can understand how they must get tons of requests like this and might not have the staff to deal with it all, since so much of it seems to be manual.

I would think a lot of this type of tracking should be automated, but as I’m learning, it looks like much of it is still manual, or in systems that don’t talk to each other. Ideally, it seems like once a show and cue sheet has been input into “a system” the first time, then all future airings of that show should trigger entries into downstream systems that feed information to the PROS, to IMDB, etc, etc… Sure it’s large, complicated and tons of data. But that’s what computers do : )

[jdstamper]

So, again, if you have used airing listings to follow up on cues, where did you find your airing listings?

Plus, a related question … it seems a lot of people use Tunesat to find undetected placements. If Tunesat finds something, then what? Do you bother referring it to your PRO? Will a PRO follow-up using just Tunesat results?

PS. I’ve not used Tunesat yet

Thanks again

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