New member / Question about collecting royalties

[cosmicdolphin]

Instead of chasing pennies you think might be missing from your royalty statement you'd be better served using the time saved to make more music.

[MBantle]

I can testify with absolute certainty on all these three things, from either personal experience or experiences of my co-writers:

1) PRO's will NOT accept Tunesat detections as proof of usage. Some friends of mine just ran into this very issue not more than a week ago, and got that message straight from the horse's mouth (in this case, the horse = BMI).

2) Usages DO sometimes slip through the cracks. This has happened to me before. I saw a show on TV (one of my favorites.... "Impractical Jokers"!) and was blown away with how they used one of my comedic hip hop cues as one of the Jokers was doing a horrible ad-lib rap over it. Time went on, other placements racked up, and I forgot all about it until years later when I thought about how much I received for that placement. Turns out, that track never showed up on a cue sheet, and must have just been left off. Chasing it would have been pointless, because....

3) You can only "chase" missed royalties dating back 2-3 quarters. So, there's a finite amount of time to rectify missed usages.

But what I will add on to all this is that I don't believe any unreported uses are deliberate attempts to sabotage your royalties. I wholeheartedly believe these are innocent mistakes, most likely due to the inputting of all cue sheet data being tasked to college interns who might be either 1) hungover; 2) multi-tasking while scrolling through social media; or 3) who really knows what else. Regardless, these menial & tedious tasks of cue-sheet data input is prone to fat-fingering, absent-mindedness, etc.... but probably not anything nefarious.

Still, it sucks to know your music was used on SOMETHING and you never got paid for it. But, like MBantle above me said, just adopt an "abundance mindset", and these missed attributions & payments will be negligible in the long-run.

~~Matt

Hi Matt,

Thank you very much for your input. I just double-checked, and the last time I contacted BMI regarding unregistered royalties was in 2023. Back then, it was about 12 one-minute placements from 2019 (they were all on SAT1 — a major private broadcaster aired in all German-speaking countries). I had sent a screenshot from Tunesat and the ISWC codes to BMI's local representative in Europe, and they investigated without questioning the Tunesat screenshot.

Maybe things have changed since then, as you mentioned your friends' experiences, or BMI might be more lenient with international placements. As I said, in hindsight, it wasn’t worth the effort, and the 'abundance mindset' is definitely the way to go.

Cheers,
Matt