PRO royalties from from radio airplay?

[Dalia]

I have a couple of songs that have been receiving airplay on internet radio stations (both in the USA and abroad), on college radio and on "terrestrial" radio stations since 7/20. I am trying to find out approximately how much one instance of radio airplay of an original song might generate in royalties from ASCAP or BMI for the writer/publisher (if anything). One PRO rep told me "a couple of dollars a play" and one told me "fractions of a cent a play" (regarding airplay the same as streaming on Spotify.) If someone knows the answer, can you please post it? I have the opportunity now to switch PROS and need to make a decision soon. Thank you very much for your help!
- a "Newbie"

[RPaul]

I have a couple of songs that have been receiving airplay on internet radio stations (both in the USA and abroad), on college radio and on "terrestrial" radio stations since 7/20. I am trying to find out approximately how much one instance of radio airplay of an original song might generate in royalties from ASCAP or BMI for the writer/publisher (if anything). One PRO rep told me "a couple of dollars a play" and one told me "fractions of a cent a play" (regarding airplay the same as streaming on Spotify.) If someone knows the answer, can you please post it? I have the opportunity now to switch PROS and need to make a decision soon. Thank you very much for your help!

The answer is, "it totally depends." Yeah, not super helpful, I know, but the underlying reason relates to following the money. Is the song playing on a major market commercial station with tens of thousands of listeners at the point when your song played? That's going to be one figure. A small-town college station? That will be a significantly lower figure. A small internet radio station that pretty much no one listens to? You'll be lucky to even get a fraction of a penny. And that is *if* your song shows up in your PRO's surveys at all. Some stations may get a complete census of their songs, but many smaller stations do a sample a few times a year. Just to give one example in the latter case, let's say you have a Christmas song that gets played heavily from Thanksgiving to Christmas, but it plays on a sampled station that only has one day of sampling, or maybe even one week of sampling, per quarter year, and the sampling for the fourth quarter occurs in October. Even if your song played once an hour from Thanksgiving to Christmas, you'll get nothing from that station because you song's play didn't correspond to the sampling period.

At least with services like Spotify they do complete census of plays, so you will see every play show up on your reports. But of course the amounts are extremely tiny, so even a bunch of plays may not lead to a penny.

In ASCAP's case they have a calculated "credit" value where various figures and weightings factor into the calculation. Here is a link to ASCAP's page that outlines their payment system and royalty calculations:

https://www.ascap.com/help/royalties-an ... /royalties

Rick

[cosmicdolphin]

I've had a couple of things on radio now, one cue was on an FM station in Australia in a Car Dealership Ad that ran for a month ( guessing it was a local station ) ...no backend at all, it was considered too small to be in the ASCAP Survey. There was something like $64 from the Library up front.

Then another cue on an Ad here in the UK on a local FM station, not sure how long it ran for but this one paid zero and less than £10 royalties iirc .

In all honesty I wouldn't expect much

[RPaul]

I've had a couple of things on radio now, one cue was on an FM station in Australia in a Car Dealership Ad that ran for a month ( guessing it was a local station ) ...no backend at all, it was considered too small to be in the ASCAP Survey. There was something like $64 from the Library up front.

Then another cue on an Ad here in the UK on a local FM station, not sure how long it ran for but this one paid zero and less than £10 royalties iirc .

In all honesty I wouldn't expect much

In the case of Australian airplay, it would be APRA that would determine what does and doesn't get picked up. They then forward the information, and any applicable payments, to your local PRO (wouldn't that be PRS, rather than ASCAP, in your case, Mark?), and, at least with ASCAP, any payments come through in the International Distribution statements, not the domestic statements that originate from ASCAPs direct reporting.

I've had a few pennies (and maybe even a few dollars?) here and there from overseas radio play (this is for songs, though, not cues in ads -- I have no clue how things compare on that front). However, I've also had a lot more times where I know personally of radio play (mostly on local, independent stations) with no statement entries at all. Most of that was in Europe, and a little in Australia. However, there was one point, back in the late 90s or early 2000s, where I had a Christmas song playing fairly regularly on a reasonably-sized station up in the Portland, Oregon area as the artist who'd covered my song was a local. It was a sampled station, though, and the sampling didn't happen during the Christmas music season, so I got zilch.

Ironically, my biggest ASCAP payments, in the multiple hundreds of dollars range, came from nominal use of one of my songs on a TV show in Canada. I say "nominal" because I had no clue how my song, which was a 9/11 song called "Help Us Understand" would have gotten in a TV show up there. There was some information in the report that helped me try to figure it out, and it turned out it wasn't my song after all. The song had a similar (but not identical) name, and the artist on it also had a similar (or maybe even identical) name, and SOCAN had messed up, which then flowed through to ASCAP and my international distribution. I reported that to ASCAP with the idea of getting the error corrected, offering to send them a check to refund the erroneous payments (plural since it came through in both my writer and publisher statements), but they couldn't (or wouldn't?) do that, so I had quite a number of reporting periods where I was showing royalties, but they were going toward recouping the erroneous payment. I was thinking it could take a half a decade or more at that point, especially after they made the same mistake, albeit for a lesser number of hundreds of dollars, to recoup given my royalties run rate at the time, but it didn't end up taking anywhere near as long as I'd expected as my level of live performance royalties (i.e. for performing my own songs in local venues) picked up significantly. Unfortunately, with the COVID-19 lockdowns, if my most recent statement wasn't already the last time for that type of royalty coming through for a while, the next round of statements will be.

Rick

[cosmicdolphin]

They then forward the information, and any applicable payments, to your local PRO (wouldn't that be PRS, rather than ASCAP, in your case, Mark?), and, at least with ASCAP, any payments come through in the International Distribution statements, not the domestic statements that originate from ASCAPs direct reporting.

PRS are affiliated with ASCAP in the US , and the LIbrary that licensed it are US based but they checked at their end and said the station is to small to be tracked by Competitrack which is what they go on. My co-writer did check with PRS but the net result was no dice.

[RPaul]

They then forward the information, and any applicable payments, to your local PRO (wouldn't that be PRS, rather than ASCAP, in your case, Mark?), and, at least with ASCAP, any payments come through in the International Distribution statements, not the domestic statements that originate from ASCAPs direct reporting.

PRS are affiliated with ASCAP in the US , and the LIbrary that licensed it are US based but they checked at their end and said the station is to small to be tracked by Competitrack which is what they go on. My co-writer did check with PRS but the net result was no dice.

Ah, okay, I see that's one difference in handling music in ads. Even the small stations should be doing some reporting to APRA for "normal" song plays, though I suspect it would be more likely to be of the sampling variety versus a complete census.

Rick