What Happens to a Cue After It Airs

Most of what we write about is the work before it ships: the brief, the writing, the revisions, the delivery. This post is about what happens after. A cue leaves our studio, lands in a spot, a promo, a trailer or an episode, and airs. For the agency or the network, the job is done. For the people who wrote the music, the paperwork that decides whether they get paid has only started.

Most of it is not the client's job. All of it depends on information that starts with the music house.

The cue sheet

A cue sheet is the list of every piece of music used in a program. For each cue it records the title, the writers and publishers with their performing rights societies and shares, how long the cue ran, and how it was used: background, theme, visual vocal and so on. The use type matters, because it affects what a performance pays.

The production prepares the cue sheet and files it with the performing rights societies. On a series, that is the production company or someone working for it. The music house does not file it, but the music house is where the information comes from. If the production does not have clean titles, splits and society details for every cue, it fills the gaps with guesses, an unnamed cue, or nothing.

How the societies pay

Performing rights societies collect license fees from broadcasters and pay them out to writers and publishers for each performance. In the US that means ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. In the UK it is PRS, in Canada SOCAN, in Germany GEMA, with a counterpart in most other territories. To pay anyone, a society needs to know two things: what went out on air, and what music was in it.

The first comes from broadcast data. BMI matches performance data from licensees and data providers against cue sheets. ASCAP pays television from its own surveys: some channels are counted in full, which it calls a census, and others are sampled, with certain days and times recorded and scaled up to stand for the rest. The second comes from the cue sheet. The society joins the two, matches each cue to a registered work, and pays the writers and publishers it finds on that registration.

What a statement shows, and what it does not

Months later, the composer receives a statement. Every line on it is money that moved: a work, a show, a period, an amount. What a statement does not contain is a list of what aired. A performance that was never matched has no row. There is no line that says a cue ran forty times and paid nothing. The gap is simply absent, so nothing on the page looks wrong.

Why a cue can air and never pay

The usual reasons, in the order they come up:

It has not been paid yet. Societies pay in quarterly or annual cycles, usually two or more quarters after the airing. BMI pays for airings about two quarters earlier. ASCAP pays writers about three quarters later. GEMA pays TV and radio once a year, on 1 July, for the previous year. Foreign income is slower still, because the foreign society pays the composer's society first, and one to two years after the performance is common.

The cue sheet is missing or wrong. It was never filed, it lists the cue under another title, it leaves out a writer or publisher, or it was filed after the society had already distributed that period.

The registration does not match. The work is registered with a missing publisher, a writer the society cannot identify, or shares that do not add up to 100 percent. Library cues with alternate titles make this easier to get wrong.

The society did not count it. On a sampled channel, an airing that falls outside the sample earns nothing on its own, even with a correct cue sheet on file.

Only the first one fixes itself.

What we send with every delivery

Most of these failures start upstream of the society, which is why we treat the paperwork as part of the delivery. As we described in how a modern music house delivers work, every cue leaves our studio with its metadata embedded in the file: title, composer, publisher, and ISRC where applicable. A cue sheet ships with every delivery, with composer and publisher splits, performing rights affiliations, clearance language, and any restrictions on the use.

The titles in our delivery match the titles our composers register. The splits add up. The publisher is named. So when the production builds its cue sheet, it copies our information instead of reconstructing it from a file name.

Why it matters to the people licensing music

The cue sheet is the production's document, but it is also part of a clean clearance. Accurate music information lets a network music department or an agency business affairs team answer "what is this cue and who controls it" in one step, a year after the campaign ran. It keeps the license, the cue sheet and the society's records saying the same thing.

It also decides whether the composers who wrote your music get paid for it. Composers keep writing for the houses and productions where a placement turns into income. Clean paperwork is a small part of the job that protects a large part of the relationship.

Tracking the other side

Delivering clean information is the part we control. Checking what happened after the airing is harder, because it means comparing two lists, what aired and what paid, one quarter and one society at a time.

To do that for our own catalog, Marc Aaron Jacobs, who runs Tonal Chaos, built ONTRK, royalty tracking software for composers. It reads royalty statements from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, SOCAN, GEMA, the MLC and more, free in the browser. Its TV detection, monitored by BMAT on 50 channels in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, opens in November and checks each airing against the statement that should have paid it. An airing whose statement is not due yet is left alone until that statement arrives. ONTRK also publishes guides on what a cue sheet is and how a missing one costs a composer and on when ASCAP, BMI, PRS, SOCAN and GEMA pay.

If your team needs the cue sheet information for a cue we delivered, or wants to see what our delivery package looks like, write us at connect@tonalchaos.com.