Why didn't I get paid for my TV placement?

The usual reasons, in the order to rule them out

• •It has not been paid yet. A performance in January may not reach a statement until the following winter, and foreign income can take two years. An airing is only missing once the statement covering its date has arrived without it.
• •The work is not registered correctly. A work your society shows as accepted can still be holding money: a party the society cannot identify, a publisher never named, or shares that do not add up to 100%. Check your registrations first, because nothing downstream can pay a work the society cannot match. For ASCAP members, the registration check reads your works export and finds these.
• •There is no cue sheet, or the wrong one. Your society learns that your music was in an episode from the cue sheet the production files. No cue sheet, or one that names the wrong cue, and the airing cannot be paid to you however many times it runs. See what a cue sheet is.
• •The society did not count it. Societies do not all count the same way. ASCAP pays from its own survey of what aired, so an airing outside what it captured can go unpaid even with a correct cue sheet.
• •It aired abroad. Overseas societies send money to your home society without the list of performances behind it, so foreign income arrives as a lump with no count and no air dates. It cannot be checked airing by airing, only in total.

How to find out which airings were never paid

You need two lists for the same period: the airings, and the statement lines. Airings come from a monitoring service that listens to broadcast TV and recognizes your music. The statement you already have.

Then match them cue by cue, on the statement that settles the period the airing happened in. Matching against the wrong quarter is the most common way to "find" a gap that is not one, because the money is on a statement that has not arrived yet.

Two more things decide whether the result can be trusted. Match on the society's work number before the title, because societies cut long titles short. And compare performance counts, not rows, because one statement line can stand for dozens of airings.

That is what reconciliation means, and it is what ONTRK does. If you already have airing data from TuneSat, BMAT or a library report, it works today. ONTRK's own TV detection is coming soon.

What to do once you have found one

Ask your society, not the library or the production. Send the work number, the title, the show, the channel and the air dates, and ask what they have on file for that performance. How each society handles it is different, and the royalty inquiry guide covers ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.

Common questions