Royalties, Royalties, and more Royalties

[stevebarden]

In case you are considering the lucrative career of TV composer, here's a sample of what to expect. My most recent ASCAP royalty statement includes payments for video-on-demand services such as Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix. The largest payout of all these was for a placement on Duck Dynasty. You may have heard of it. It's a rather popular show. For this quarter, this 19-second cue played on Amazon a total of 232,701 times! Yes, over 200,000 times.

Total payment: $4.07.

You may ask, "Steve! Why do you do this? Surely you can make more money doing something else???"

And to that I say: "What??? And get out of show business???"

Happy composing!

[sansharbour]

Steve

That's a tad humorous.
Sort of reminds me of Chevy Chase opening the expected Christmas Bonus letter on Christmas Vacation

I was thinking the other day about the amount of money we spend on gear to provide the highest quality we can for potential TV shows
I'm sure some of your other placements have fared better

If it makes you feel any better, that's 4.07 more than I got.

Cheers
Don

[Paulie]

Out of curiosity, what would it have paid if played on television that many times?

[stevebarden]

Out of curiosity, what would it have paid if played on television that many times?

Paulie, for comparison, this 19-second cue on this episode played 4 times in prime time which paid $17, and played 3 times in the morning for $7.80.

If it paid at this same rate on the streaming sites I would be a rich man.

These ridiculous rates are similar with audio streaming services like Rhapsody and Spotify.

[Russell Landwehr]

Well, this is great news! You are making ROYALTIES from music you created! Yeeeeehaaaaa!

Congrats! and
Keep on feeding the machine...

Volume = $,$$$,$$$.$$

Russell

[Paulie]

So, if you received that many morning plays you would have earned about $605,000.

Yep, I thought the same thing about the music streaming services also. Our industry is in significant flux.

[sabalsounds]

Steve - thanks for sharing the painful truth. I just joined TAXI but learned years ago all we can ever really "bank" on is the joy of the process. Suffice to say, that's a bitter pill to swallow at times.

Paulie re: "significant flux" I think you've got a misspelling there

[admin]

Worth thinking about: How many viewers does one TV play of duck Dynasty get? In 2013 they had 12 million viewers. The article I found didn't say if that was for just one airing or not. But the comparison might explain why the TV version pays so much better than online streams. I'm probably screwing this up and not considering all factors, but the TV audience seems to be 51.56 times the size of the streams. Maybe that explains it?

Certainly worth examining! I'd love for more folks to research this and weigh in. Good topic Steve!

Thank God not all licensing income is from streams... yet! But, as the audiences grow, maybe the payments will.

best,
Michael

[stevebarden]

Michael, I think the future looks pretty dismal. There is a huge disparity regarding royalties between broadcast TV and streaming sites. Sure, many shows like Duck Dynasty are available on streaming sites after their initial broadcast on cable, but there are now many original shows being developed, such as House of Cards and Grace & Frankie on Netflix, Bosch and Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon, and Deadbeat and Quick Draw on Hulu, just to name a few.

The business model needs to change since none of this is going away. Cable royalty rates are already extremely low. With more shows moving to streaming on-demand we can expect even lower payouts. And let's not even start talking about almost non-existent revenue sharing from license and sync fees that the music libraries receive!

[admin]

Yeah, it's another case of tech outpacing legislation, PROs, etc. I've even considered not running listings for shows that stream, but I think the members would kill me.

Michael