Karen "Kay" Ross has asked me to repost one of my questions from "ASCAP-BMI" as an independent post:
Has anyone lurking here been paid royalties for music in a film that has had say under 1,000 showings on ANY cable channel, satellite channel, Amazon, Apple TV or Netflix?
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ASCAP informed me that they don't have a contract with the cable channel 'shorts.tv' and using another collection entity which 'samples' film showings, there were no showings of the film I scored. My film production company sent me a copy of the showings of the film reported to them directly from shorts.tv. There have been 15 showings. I passed it on to ASCAP. They refused it and insisted they only pay royalties based on their sample data. They have no procedure to accept data from any other source. If your film showed but is not in their sample, they don't pay and will not try to collect from the showing entity.
In fact, I personally believe that whoever ASCAP uses to collect their data doesn't collect from/sample from shorts.tv at all. If so, any composer who scored a film which shows on that channel is left out.
My understanding was/has been that if a composer scores a film that shows on a cable/satellite channel, they are entitled to royalties based on the number of showings - no matter how small.... again, it seems to me that the collected money is being divided up imho in a way that higher volume showed films are getting 'portions' that should have gone to low volume films.
interesting!