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Yesterday, the wonderful Escape Directors and I sat with TuneSat in New York City to demo their audio monitoring service. If you “think” you have music on television, this service might be the one to help get you just the proof you need to compare to your PRO statements. (BMI, ASCAP and SESAC). TuneSat claims that 80% of the music on television is inaccurately accounted for.
TuneDat has been in business since 2009 and has its headquarters in NYC. They consider themselves the leader in independent audio monitoring on television. They were started by composers who believed the PRO’s were simply unable to accurately report music that was on broadcast, satellite or cable television due to the still-manual process’ that the PRO’s use. TuneSat covers the United States and several other countries where they have been able to start tracking data.
its 2011 right? Why aren’t the PRO’s using such a device to accurately pull data?
It works like this. TuneSat developed the technology to record, in almost real-time, any music even in the most buried of sound environments. In seconds they pulled up a sortable spreadsheet that showed the channel, the show, the song, the artist, the metadata to the song, the publishing among other sortable data. How they do this is by fingerprinting your catalog first. This way they can have accurate meta data on your catalog of music. Once the fingerprinting is done they can search even as far back as 2009 for how and when your songs were played. They can even offer a service to compare your PRO statements to see how accurate they are. If you’re a band that has music on television, what better way to see if your music has accurately been accounted for? With the service starting in the $15 a month, range, it could easily pay for itself over the course of a year with a just a few matches. All you’d have to do is re-submit the data to your PRO, they can verify it and they should-in-theory send your back-royalties right over to you.
TuneSat even offers legal recourse services if you encounter programming that might have been infringing on your content. Your monthly service comes with a audio sample of how the music was used. With the data and the audio sample proof, how can you lose?
The startling number is the 80% figure of unaccounted for music on cable and satellite television. Is it possible that the PRO’s are missing out on reporting four out of every five songs used on television? TuneSat claims this to be fact. Even if you are skeptical on that high a number, it serves to justify the potential a service like this could have.
I was personally impressed with the TuneSat team and found it an easy option for bands that have commercially licensed their material in the past. In the near future, TuneSat moves to expand operations to provide the same service for the entire internet.
Something tells me that 80% number is about to rise.
Something tells me the PRO’s are gonna need to hire more people….and fast.
matt
ktcmgmt.com, killingthecabinet.com