Introducing ONTRK: Royalty Tracking for Composers

Tonal Chaos now has four parts. The music and sound design studio, Tonal Chaos Trailers, DropCue, and now ONTRK, royalty tracking software for composers.

Why we built it

Every cue we write for a trailer, a spot or an episode is supposed to earn performance royalties when it airs. The only proof we ever got was the royalty statement, and a statement only lists what a society paid. It never lists what aired. A cue that ran forty times and was never matched simply has no line, so nothing on the page looks wrong.

Checking it by hand meant comparing two lists, one society and one quarter at a time, for every composer in our library. So Marc Aaron Jacobs, who runs Tonal Chaos, built a tool to read our own statements. That tool became ONTRK.

What it does today

ONTRK reads royalty statements from twelve societies: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, SOCAN, GEMA, SACEM, SIAE, TONO, JASRAC, the MLC and SoundExchange, across eighteen export formats. It shows what each cue earned, where it aired, and how much of the statement carries a performance count at all, because a line with money and no count cannot be checked against an airing.

The statement is read in your browser. The file itself is never uploaded, and only the extracted rows are stored. The statement analyzer is free and unlimited, with no account.

What opens in November

TV detection, monitored by BMAT on 50 channels in the US, UK, Europe and Australia. Uses as short as 2 seconds are caught, so stings and bumpers count, and cutdowns are matched from the full mix. ONTRK compares every airing with the statement that should have paid it. An airing whose statement is not due yet waits for that statement. A performance that was never paid gets flagged, and ONTRK builds the inquiry you send to your society, with the airings attached.

Monitoring plans start at $15 a month for 25 tracks, and every plan includes all your statements. The full list is on the pricing page.

Where to start

Open ontrk.app, drop in your latest statement, and see what every cue earned. ONTRK is also on the App Store for iPhone. Questions go to hello@ontrk.app, and a person reads every message.