M+E Daily

By Larry Logan, Chief Marketing Officer, Digimarc

Production music proliferates across the gamut of media productions, from television programs to network promos to theatrical movie trailers. Tracks are typically used in very short durations and mixed with sound effects and voice-overs.

Additionally, it’s increasingly more common in today’s production music environment that the same piece of music can be licensed by different suppliers.

Together, these realities present significant identification challenges for prevailing monitoring and reporting systems.

Until now, the organizations charged with collecting royalties for music played on the ever-expanding array of media outlets, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC (known as performing rights organizations or PROs), have relied on labor-intensive, manual reports known as cue sheets, or audio-fingerprint solutions that are prone to false positive identifications. Cue sheets are typically prepared and submitted by the producer of the media program to the PROs.

Since there are no standards for cue sheets, they arrive at the PROs in many disparate formats, from Excel spreadsheets to PDF documents to exported reports from homegrown or published software programs. Because cue sheets can touch many hands in the process, they are often late and error-prone before the tedious process of matching them to song and airing schedule information to distribute royalties by the PROs ever begins. As such, the PROs have taken steps towards adopting more automated tracking solutions.

One approach has been audio fingerprinting. In this scenario, music signals are matched against audio within large reference databases. But the efficacy of fingerprinting is not fully reliable, resulting in false positives and missed performances.

Moreover, fingerprinting cannot distinguish different payees on a track that has been licensed on a non-exclusive basis by multiple suppliers. As this trend has become more common, fingerprinting has become an even less viable solution for PROs in making accurate royalty distributions.

What is needed now is a system that can accurately monitor and unequivocally identify music tracks.

Digital audio watermarking fits this bill. Unlike fingerprinting, advanced digital identification technology is deterministic, meaning that the ID in the track is read directly versus the probabilistic matching against an external database.

This approach provides extremely robust and more accurate performance information.

And, unlike watermarking solutions in the past, the latest technology is imperceptible and does not distort the original audio file.

Recognizing the unparalleled performance of digital audio watermarking, SourceAudio, the leading music-licensing search and distribution platform, is working with Digimarc to deliver an accurate and comprehensive broad-cast performance monitoring and reporting platform for music suppliers.

The solution, SourceAudio Detect, empowers music rights holders to verify their royalty collections from PROs and more accurately substantiate track title identification, track ownership, and license authority. It provides the widest monitoring coverage available for production music in programs and advertisements on network, cable and local television.

“Digital identification solutions help solve today’s top issues in royalty verification and collection for all stakeholders in the performance licensing supply chain, including publishers, composers and their performing rights organizations (PROs), ASCAP, BMI and SESAC,” said Hunter Williams, Executive Vice President, IP and Business Development at SourceAudio.

When music suppliers host their catalog on SourceAudio and choose SourceAudio Detect, SourceAudio embeds a unique identity in versions of every file that is uploaded.

The system then reports where, when and how the tracks are used with respect to pro-grams versus commercials. The intuitive dashboard allows rights holders to search, filter and export usage reports as they review their broadcast performance data.

The monitoring system initially covers more than 150 national broadcast and cable channels, and approximately 100 local broadcast stations, with expanded coverage to be added in the future. Digital audio watermarking is an exciting development for songwriters, composers, publishers, labels and music libraries that are dissatisfied with the accounting of their current distribution models.

Through better monitoring artists stand to gain the recognition they deserve.