![]() Sometimes, entire quarters would go by without a single reported use of his music, when he knew it was being played. He helped launch TuneSat in 2009, in part, to solve his own problem. Woods is not just a critic of these organizations he’s been a client of BMI since 2004 as a music composer with “thousands and thousands and thousands of performances” of “nearly a thousand works” on television every quarter, such as theme songs and network identification packages. A lot of the societies have postured that they are using technology, whether ASCAP with MediaGuide, which ceased operations on March 1, or Landmark Digital with BMI (which uses Shazam)… what they’re actually using that technology for, I can’t tell you.” It’s been a manually-reported process since the inception of performing rights organizations. There is beyond a lot of room for improvement in the process. “I don’t want to speak disparagingly of the performing rights societies, but the fact of the matter is, as you said, if they were doing their job properly, there would be no TuneSat and we would have zero clients. “I don’t know what to say,” said Woods after we read him the responses from ASCAP and BMI. Instead, it has many, including heavy-hitters such as The Orchard, Universal Music Publishing Group, NBC Sports, and around 250 more - up from around 100 a year ago, an expansion financed in part by a $6 million investment from General Electric. If ASCAP and BMI aren’t missing anything, there would be no reason for TuneSat to exist - or if it did, it would have no clients. There’s one big problem with both responses. This path has allowed us to distribute royalties exceeding $800 million annually to our songwriter, composer and publisher members, which we have done for the past four years, delivering a total of over $3.3 billion to our members. ASCAP processes over 250 billion performances annually and we set a high bar in terms of the standards of accuracy and cost effectiveness before choosing a technology solution. We were genuinely surprised to see those comments as ASCAP has been utilizing audio fingerprinting technology for over 15 years, as well as pursuing and utilizing technology solutions from various sources to track performances of our members’ works.ĪSCAP has always sought the most advanced methods to monitor performances and we are constantly evaluating different technologies and solutions to enhance the service we provide to our members. A spokesman sent Evolver.fm a lengthy email citing the fact that Information Week called it the 74th most innovative user of business technology and that it delivered $796 million to its clients out of the $931 million it collected last year.ĪSCAP senior vice president of marketing Lauren Iossa was more forthcoming: (We’re also quite busy.)īMI, which apparently uses technology created by Shazam to find its clients music in broadcasts, declined to comment on the record. I’ve heard startups lob similar accusations at the establishment for years, and not always with merit, so I checked with BMI and ASCAP to see how they felt about these accusations - one reason we’ve been sitting on this story for so long. Woods went on to explain that those organizations are too slow, too mired in the past, and “not nimble enough.” Someone else in the audience piped up, “Where do we start?” I saw TuneSat’s Chris Woods explain what his company does at a MusicTech Meetup in Brooklyn last month, after which I posed a question: “Why don’t ASCAP and BMI use this technology, or simply buy TuneSat outright?” My question was met with knowing guffaws. The computers actually identify what is being played, rather than counting on broadcasters and webcasters to report things accurately. This is why we’ve been intrigued by TuneSat, which actually sets up televisions and computers, and feeds them into other computers. To borrow a phrase from the old Six Million Dollar Man television show, “we have the technology” to fix this: audio fingerprinting, which can identify every song and snippet of a song that plays on every radio station, television channel, and streaming radio company. Back when I did college radio, we used to write down each song we played to submit them to these PROs, and to a great extent, that is still how they work. In 2012, there is no longer a need for either of those ancient approaches. These organizations – ASCAP and BMI are the big ones – have traditionally relied on the radio, television, and internet music companies they monitor to report what they played, and to how many people, then they cross-reference that with random sampling. Their goal: to figure out who should get paid. For nearly 100 years, performing rights organizations have tracked the music played on the radio, then the television, and now the internet.
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