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Originally Posted by terminal3  Really? I worked as an editor at a post house that didn't do cue sheets, they said they didn't have to based on the terms of their library - they made not filing them as a condition of purchase for the library. The buyout price up front was how the library company made money. I don't know what library they were using, though (but they did pay for it!) - maybe they were lying to me, but we did do the odd bit for TV, all filled with library music, and I never heard a word about cue sheets. I'm happy to be wrong here, I'm not trying to dodge any responsibility, I just know that the manpower on the projects we're working on now to do this sort of thing is minimal to none.
Nothing we're doing now is destined for broadcast yet, it's all for YouTube and those ilk. How do we go about filing cue sheets for those? Does YouTube pay ASCAP/BMI etc? If it does ever get picked up to broadcast it would all be repurposed anyway, and at that point I could certainly convince them that cue sheets need to be filed. |
Thanks for your honesty. Cue sheets are how composers get paid. A huge part of a composers income is from performance royalties generated by broadcast and collected via a PRO (performing rights organization - ASCAP, BMI, ETC.). Without a cue sheet there is no way to determine who to pay or collect $$$ for. It would be like working a factory job, and not filling out your timecard and expecting - hope against hope - that you might get paid. It's not gonna happen.
Composers make very little to nothing up front these days for delivering a completed CD. With a buyout library, I do not make a DIME from any CD distributed with ANY of the 5-6 libraries I'm associated with. 100% of that $$ goes to the library - SO, without cue sheets, I might spend 2+ months on a CD and see NOTHING - Ever!!!! With the libraries that charge a license fee, I get between $25-50% of the license fee, so there is some income there in addition to the PRO collected performance royalties. Luckily, most places are more informed (don't mean that as a put down - just a fact) than you are. I suggest you do a little more research and contact a few libraries and get their take on it.
It costs the post studio, producer, etc. NOTHING to do, and allows the libraries and composers to continue to put out product. It is FAST and EASY to do, and almost any library will assist you to help you understand and get the hang of it. Most have an excell spreadsheet that you can download and quickly fill in. You can even do it while editing. It only takes maybe 15-20 seconds per cue. I suggest that whichever library you contact, you ask them the questions above. The internet, youtube, etc. is a bit of wild, wild west right now. Laws are changing and BMI/ASCAP, etc are trying to figure out ways to collect. They will in fact figure it out, and cue sheets will be required - or maybe metadata tagged to the file, or perhaps digital watermarked. I'm not sure exactly how it will work out, but they will figure it out. There's a huge push towards it.
As for how your previous post house dodged the bullet, I'm not sure, but by law, broadcast programs must file a cue sheet with the broadcaster. It's likely that the producers of the show(s) put themselves down as the writer/publisher. (Fairly common and as low down dirty as it gets.)
So, to make it brief (too late I guess) - ROYALTY free does NOT mean REPORTING/CUE SHEET free.
Good luck.