This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Chris Woods is the Executive Vice President and COO of TuneSat, a technology-based service that offers a solution to the problems of inaccurate performance reporting, lost royalty payments and copyright infringement within the music space. A graduate of Berklee School of Music and a proficient musician, composer, engineer and producer with over 15 years of industry experience, Chris has created music branding packages for many television networks, including Fox Sports, Versus, Comcast, Fuel and Big Ten. He co-founded TuneSat in 2007 along with Scott Schreer and has helped build the company’s technology offering, including surveying, acquisition and development of audio fingerprinting algorithms. Chris is also a regular speaker at industry events, including CMJ, the Billboard Film & TV Music Conference, the NARM Convention and the CISAC Copyright Summit.
I recently spoke to Chris about his experience in music and technology, how TuneSat works for artists and some sound advice he has for musicians that want to get their music placed in film, television and on the Internet.
Thanks so much for speaking with me, Chris. How did you get involved in the music industry, and how did the idea for TuneSat come about?
CW:
Like a lot of people who are in the music industry as performers, musicians or artists, I got started at an early age. I played guitar and piano growing up and played in rock bands. After a couple semesters in college I decided I wanted to work in music, but I didn’t want that career to be traveling around in a band with a bunch of smelly dudes working for $50 a day. I decided I’d like to get a better understanding of the music industry and get involved in a way that wasn’t just trying to be a rock star – and ended up at Berklee in the late 90’s. Outside of music, I have a real passion for technology, so I studied a lot of the music technology programs and majored in music synthesis. I learned a lot about creating things like reverb algorithms and effects. Berklee is a great place to develop a large understanding for the tech side of music and audio.
When I graduated, I came to New York and got a job as an engineer and producer at a jingle company. While I was there I met and worked with Scott Schreer, who has a rich past in the music business. He had a vision to automate how music on TV is reported to PROs and used Watermark technology to learn how much music was reported correctly with the current manual process. Using a production music catalog that he owned, we tracked the performances on TV for a couple of years and found that of half a million detected performances, less than 20% made it to a cue sheet. So, we really had a lot of information by using that catalog that showed a huge discrepancy in how music is used vs. how much is actually reported to PRO’s.
So, your product really brings to task not so much the PROs but the people who report to the PROs.
CW:
Exactly. It just highlights a broken link in the chain. It’s not really the PROs that are at fault here. It’s the mechanism of reporting. It’s a manual process and the same process that it was when they started almost a century ago. It’s still a paper business, which seems kind of crazy in this day and age, when you have all this technology that can do it for you.
We wanted to move away from watermarking in 2004, because we knew it wasn’t the end-all-be-all. The problem with watermarking is that it’s a “going forward” technology, and only recordings that have the watermark embedded in them will be detected. So, let’s say I watermark the White album today, only versions with that watermark will be detected. Everything that’s been in distribution will never be detected. Fingerprinting solves this issue.
Sure. It’s dependent on an additive. And because of the Internet, things are spread everywhere. So there’s no guarantee you’ll get even a percentage of the marketplace.
CW:
Yes. Fingerprinting has been around for a while. But before, it was cost prohibitive, because it’s very memory and CPU intensive. Around 2004, the cost started going down on hardware, and it became a viable solution.
We scoured the universe testing with every major and minor fingerprint technology out there at the time. The benchmark for the technology we needed was that it would have to find the music in a highly dirty audio environment and calculate the amount of time it played, because for the most part music performances on TV play by duration. In sports broadcasting, half the time you can’t even tell music is playing because there’s so much extra noise and it’s so low in the mix.
After months of testing with various technologies, we found a guy in France who had developed the holy grail of audio fingerprinting algorithms – Sylvain Demongeot. His particular fingerprint algorithm was by far the most robust we’d ever tested, and had the ability to detect music in as few as three seconds, even in a dirty audio environment such as crowd noise, voiceovers, or sound effects. We brought him into the fold and started developing what would ultimately become TuneSat.
And how does the business work?
CW:
It’s a subscription-based company. Anyone can join: small, medium, or large. We charge a monthly subscription fee based on the number of songs you put into the system and the territories you want to track. We expanded in the fall of 2009, built another data center outside of Paris, and started monitoring broadcasting in France, UK, Germany and Italy.
A little more than a month ago, we added eight new countries to our monitoring lineup: Spain; The Netherlands; Austria; Switzerland; Sweden; Denmark; Norway; Finland. It was a pretty large expansion for us.
We also developed a platform on our website where anybody can go and sign up anytime and anywhere, by picking which territories to monitor, the number of songs they want to put into their account, upload their files and push a button to fingerprint it. Clients can then get access to their TuneSat account and near-real-time detection data. The detections typically come in within an hour after the broadcast. We provide the date, time, channel, show, episode, number of plays, and more.
Is this a product geared more towards people who have larger libraries and a significant income from sync? Or is your average guy in a band going to benefit from this?
CW:
The size of the catalog really doesn’t matter. We have clients with 10 tracks in the system and clients with 250,000 tracks. Our clients represent a really wide range. You can see a good sampling of them on our website at www.tunesat.com/clients
So what would be the benefit of opening a TuneSat account for people that fit into the category of what you mentioned before – “a bunch of smelly dudes” just scraping by, touring in a van?
CW:
That’s part of the expanded services. We used to have larger tiers as a minimum in our system – starting at 50 tracks. Now our entry tier is “up to 10 tracks,” which starts at $10 per month. For that amount, you can upload and track 10 songs on television all across the U.S. The value in the data is to know exactly when and where your music is being used and using that information to make sure you’re being properly paid.
We are in the midst of launching an Internet monitoring service, which will expand our client base. What about all the people that don’t have music on TV, but they’re YouTube stars, or they just want to know who’s using their music and where it is. We’ll be monitoring millions of websites for the use of our clients’ music and we’ll provide them with the URLs and contact information when an identification is made.
Musician Coaching:
I would imagine you’re also drilling down on places where people do get paid.
CW:
Absolutely. I’ve been on a number of panels recently where the hot topic is the future of music and the Internet. It’s funny, because a lot of the societies still refer to it as “new media.” And it’s a 20-year old platform. The societies are still struggling to find ways to collect the licensing fees and make the distributions to the right people. It’s a real problem and a real challenge and the only way to solve it is through technology. That’s why we’re getting into the Internet monitoring space – to provide valuable information to the people who either own or administer audio content on the internet specific to music.
It’s just a gut feeling – and I don’t know if you would know this – but I can’t imagine there isn’t a fair amount of fear at PROs surrounding the idea that if they suddenly became accountable for everything that was being played in perfect clarity, there would be no more float; they wouldn’t be able to afford the payments. Is this true?
CW:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a highly disruptive technology, and there is a lot of fear.
And I’m not looking to stir the pot too much. But it is a question that begs answering: How has the technology been received, and how are you guys dealing with that?
CW:
I think the problem is, as you said earlier, that there’s fear: “What about the current system? What happens to that, and how do we transition?” They don’t know. They’ve been trying to figure this out for probably 10-15 years now.
We’ve continued to bring this technology to societies not just domestically, but also internationally. We’ve said, “Here’s a better way to do it.” It’s more transparent, more accountable, and almost instantaneously delivers the detection results. This is a better way to track music usage, and not just for television. As we move into the future, and TV and radio license fees start to drop because licensing fees are being moved over to the internet, they’re going to have to find a way to license websites for the use of music in a very effective way. Otherwise, the whole system will break.
Again, there’s a lot of fear. It’s a disruptive technology, and it certainly challenges the existing business. It’s pretty much the same issue with the PROs in every country.
Musician Coaching:
Are people gaining any traction by having these reports in their hands when they approach PROs to collect royalties?
CW:
Absolutely. We don’t tell people to use TuneSat as a weapon; they should use it as a tool. We have applications that compare digital royalty statements to TuneSat detections. These delta reports show everything that was detected that was not a part of their royalty distribution, which TuneSat clients can use to go file claims with their local society. Right now we’re doing this for four different societies – ASCAP, BMI, PRS and GEMA. We’ll soon add the other societies for the countries we monitor. Our clients have been very successful in using the data to fix the problem, which is the lack of reporting, under reporting and false reporting. The challenges in manual cue sheet reporting are vast.
That’s fantastic. I had no idea how it was being received, or if people were seeing it as voodoo.
CW:
It’s been received well, and we’re not only supplying time-stamped information. We also supply recordings of every captured detection as proof-positive of the use. It’s irrefutable proof. If I capture my song playing on a commercial, I have a recording as proof.
Wow. I didn’t realize that. That’s great.
CW:
Being able to supply recordings of it is a key part of the business. Not only do our clients use it to check their royalty statements and for the business intelligence, but they also monitor for copyright infringement. It’s a much larger problem than we ever thought it would be on television. Obviously, it’s rampant on the Internet. But you’d think broadcasters, production companies and ad agencies would protect themselves more. They really don’t.
The typical TuneSat user finds unlicensed uses within the first couple weeks of service. Then they have the data to go out and take action.
Which of course puts you in an advantageous position.
CW:
Our mission is to empower the rights owners. That’s really what it’s all about.
As somebody who gets his music placed and is also an expert at making sure it gets found, aside from using TuneSat, are there lessons you’ve learned the hard way that you would impart to musicians looking to get their music placed?
CW:
Yes. I’d say for musicians looking to get their content placed or who are just starting out in the music space and looking to get music placed on TV, the most important things are:
To learn more about Chris Woods and his company, visit the TuneSat website.
Neeta Ragoowansi is the Director of Artist-Label Relations for SoundExchange. She is also an attorney, a keyboard player and the singer for an eight piece group called the Oxymorons. Her experience as a musician, as the Assistant General Counsel for the Kennedy Center and The National Symphony Orchestra and as an advocate in the music industry were what landed her in her current position. She explains her job educating and helping to find the thousands of artists and labels that are owed SoundExchange royalties
Tell me how SoundExchange differs from the other Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.
NR:
We are a performance rights organization, but we represent the performers and recording artists- that is, we protect the performers who go into the studio and put down the sounds- instruments or voice – onto a track. ASCAP, BMI and SESAC collect for songwriters and composer of the underlying musical work – the notes and lyrics on paper. So if you’re a songwriter or composer, sign-up with one of those. If you’re a recording artist, and put your talent down in a sound recording, sign up with SoundExchange. You can be a member of one of the three songwriter PROs AND SoundExchange – and you probably should be. It’s in no way a conflict. PROs help to collect and distribute the royalties that accrue when others publicly perform your copyrighted work. When you talk about music, you have two copyrights involved: the songwriter’s right to the music and lyrics on the page, and the musician or artist’s right to the sounds on a track – they may be the same person, but there are still two different rights. SoundExchange is the PRO that administrates the rights that come under the public performance of the sound recording. 50% of the royalty on each track goes to the performers or artists on the sound recording – 45% to the main recording artist and 5% to the session musicians and back up singers on that track, through RARoyalties.org. The other 50% of the royalties on each track goes to the owner of the master recording, which might be a record label or an independent musician.
Does SoundExchange cover all different kinds of mediums, or are there specific types of mediums that you cover?
NR:
SoundExchange collects royalties when sound recordings are used on satellite radio (like SIRIUS-XM) , Internet radio (like Pandora), on cable TV music channels, and certain other streaming services. SoundExchange DOES NOT collect for digital downloads (like iTunes or “podcasting”) or “on-demand” and “interactive” services like YouTube or MySpace, where a user can select and immediately play the song she wants to hear. SoundExchange also does not collect for the streaming of any audiovisual work, including music videos. We also don’t collect for sound recordings used on radio, because radio doesn’t pay artists for using their work – yet.
SoundExchange is hoping that will change, and we’ve teamed up with lots of organizations and artist advocates to support a bill in Congress called the Performance Rights Act (PRA). If it passes, PRA would mean that for the first time, corporate radio would have to start paying a royalty to artists and labels for the use of their sound recordings. Radio makes almost fifteen billion dollars a year in ad revenue from music stations alone, and they don’t share any of it with the artists who create the music. They do pay composers and publishers via ASCAP, BMI and SESAC; but because of a loophole in copyright law, the creators and copyright owners of the sound recordings are not getting paid. In the rest of the world, almost every single country pays their artists this way – the US’s only company on this is China, Rwanda, North Korea, Iran. That’s not good company to be in which it comes to protecting rights. Using an artist’s work to make money and not paying them a royalty is just wrong. We’re trying to get that loophole changed, so artists and rights owners can be paid fairly.
There was no SoundExchange until ten years ago?
NR:
SoundExchange began in 2000, and became an independent nonprofit in 2003. Legislation passed in 1995 (The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995) and in 1998 (The Digital Millennium Copyright Act) finally recognized the rights of artists and copyright holders to be compensated when others use their work, and the laws set up a stream of royalties for the recording artist and sound recording copyright owner. After some negotiations to decide what those royalties would look like, SoundExchange started collecting, and made its first distribution in 2001. We distributed $4 million that year. In 2009 we distributed $147 million.
There’s a ton of money that’s unclaimed by artists. Can you estimate how much outstanding money is owed?
NR:
There are millions of dollars owed to thousands of recording artists who’ve not yet registered with SoundExchange. Because SoundExchange and the performance right are relatively young, a lot of artists don’t know they’re owed this money, or they just haven’t signed the forms. Remember, unlike ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, who collect only for their members, SoundExchange collects royalties for everyone who’s getting played, whether they’ve ever heard of us or not. Then we have to try to track down those artists and rights holders and get them to register so we know where to send the check. We regularly partner with industry associations, services and companies like ReverbNation, CD Baby, iLike, Sonicbids, The Blues Foundation, The Folk Alliance, The Vocal Group Hall of Fame and lots of others, to help get the word out about this right and these royalties. We match their member lists against the lists of artists we have money for, and then have them send an e-mail or a letter to that unclaimed recording artist and/or indie record label. In 2009 alone, we notified more than 15,000 artists, owed more than $9 million in all. If you think there’s even a chance you might be owed money, register at SoundExchange.com. It’s always 100% free.
So, a lot of your job right now is just an awareness campaign.
NR:
Yes, it’s a huge awareness and marketing campaign and it’s mostly about educating – outreach and education. Through conference panel, doing things exactly like this interview, talking one-on-one to artists at festivals, and making sure we get the word out every way we can. Maybe finally getting paid for their work just sounds too good to be true – sometimes artists think we’re an email scam. We find that even when artists have received emails from trusted sources (like their manager, their booking service, whatever) saying, “Hey, SoundExchange has money for you,” they don’t always believe it or do anything about it. But then they go to CMJ as a showcasing artist, for example, and get an email from CMJ saying we have money for them, and see our trade booth and see a poster with their name on it, that they finally remember the name SoundExchange and realize that this really means money for them. Sometimes it takes 3 and 4 and 5 contacts before people recognize that SoundExchange is legit, and sometimes a few more before they fill out the forms. People are just naturally skeptical, and this sounds like ‘free money,’ so it must be too good to be true. But it’s not ‘free money’ – it’s better – it’s money they’ve already earned. All an artist has to do is register with SoundExchange, and they can get paid when they get played.
At what point would you sign up for SoundExchange as an artist?
NR:
When you go into the studio to record and you come out with a recording that you release. As soon as you start sending out your recordings, you should sign up with SoundExchange. But I tell artists, anyone that’s even planning to do a recording, should go ahead and register. It usually only takes 10 to 20 minutes, and it’s free. We just need to know you exist, where you are and where we would properly send a check. In terms of recording artists, anyone that is a member of a band or featured artist in general should register with SoundExchange. There are certain housekeeping things that a musician needs to do and registering with SoundExchange is definitely one of them!
Is there any pre-requisite to sign up?
NR: There is no prerequisite other than that you are a performer on a commercially released sound recording and/or you’re the owner of the sound recording copyright (sessions musicians and back up singers on sound recordings are entitled to a royalty as well and they should go to www.raroyalties.org to claim theirs). The copyright in the sound recording is automatic, as soon as the original creative work (like the sounds made on your instrument) is fixed to a tangible medium (a CD, a digital track, MP3). You don’t have to go to the Copyright Office and register in order to claim royalties from SoundExchange.
Music Consultant: Where does this money come from?
NR:
At SoundExchange we administer the public performance royalty that derives from the non-interactive, digital transmissions of commercially released sound recordings. So when a streaming service like the ones we talked about before use a track, it generates a small royalty. At the end of the month, those services that use your track total up all the royalties they owe, and give that money to SoundExchange. They are also required to provide us with reports of use (playlists in a sense) so we know what they’ve played, and how to divide up that lump payment. This is very different from what’s happened historically with other performance rights organizations, where they tend to pay out based on sample data – a few weeks a year to represent all of what they play. SoundExchange strives to get what’s called census data – that is, the exact tracks they are playing, every time they play them. That’s the fairest way to pay, and so far, 95% of the royalties SoundExchange distributes have this track-level census data. How much each service pays for a track is determined by the kind of service they are, and how many listeners hear the track, under rules set by the Copyright Royalty Board at the Library of Congress. For the most part, artists get paid more the more people hear their tracks. So if you can get played on more stations, to more people, or even on SIRIUS-XM, or cable TV music channels (not the video channels, but the high-numbered radio-like channels), you’ll get paid more.
Do you have any general advice for artists?
NR:
Know all the places you can generate income from, know about all the special payment funds available to you out there, know your licensing rights/copyrights and educate yourself. Knowing licensing is the number one thing that artists can do for themselves. If you’re going to make a living, you have to know the income you can generate from various sources. Once you send a creation out into the world, it generates different streams of revenue – but it’s your responsibility to make sure they lead back to you. So, keep creating, know your licensing, go collect on that licensing and push your stuff out there in areas where you’re going to see income, such as the digital streaming of your music and recordings. And register with SoundExchange, so you can get paid when you get played!
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