Why Music Monitoring is an Impossible Challenge for PROs

Performance rights organizations (PROs) are tasked with enforcing copyright laws. Basically, this means trying to identify what music is being broadcast or played and collecting the appropriate royalties. This is the first of two short articles examining the role of PROs. This article will focus on the pre-digital age — radio, TV, live music and broadcasting in public spaces. The next article will focus on streaming.

The role of the PRO has never been a walk in the park. The PRO takes on the responsibility of collecting royalty payments for musicians and other rights holders, in exchange for membership fees. They are typically non-profit organizations, formed and managed by artists and publishers. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) paid out over $1 billion in royalties to its members in 2017.

Each time a song is played anywhere in the world — on the radio, in a nightclub, as background music in a restaurant — the rights holder is owed a royalty payment. For a songwriter, signing up with a PRO is the only way to earn money from these public performances of their work.

With each new technological advance in music recording, the role of the PRO has become progressively more challenging. From cassette tape, to CD, to MP3, to streaming — each step has made it easier for anyone to create and distribute copies of music. These days, copying a track takes roughly the same amount of time as strumming a chord.

PROs now have the challenge of monitoring the music played on TV, radio, live performances, and streaming services and securing the associated royalty payments. Even more problematic is tracking music played in venues such as bars, restaurants, nightclubs, gyms, and shops — all over the world.

There are a variety of ways to track and attribute music consumption, but they all have more holes than the stage attire of an 80’s punk band.

Going Gaga with Radio Monitoring

While music that’s played on a TV show is generally reported to a PRO using cue sheets submitted by the music producer, radio is a little more complicated. In some cases, PROs will conduct digital monitoring, whereas in others they ask the radio station to submit playlists. They may also issue surveys to collect samples of play data. Using the results of these surveys, a PRO then makes assumptions about the royalties due to each rights holder.

Demanding royalty payments becomes difficult with smaller underground or pirate radio stations where the operators may be anonymous. If they manage to stay under the PROs radar, or if the PRO cannot extract royalty payments, it’s the rights holder who’s left singing for their supper.

Live Covers

In the US, PROs require that the biggest grossing venues report their setlists from live performances. The rest are expected to self-report. The challenges with this are immediately apparent. It seems unlikely that every single venue playing live music reports every instance where a song is covered so that the royalty payments can be correctly attributed, meaning it’s another hole in the leaky bucket of royalties collection.

Thank you for the Background Music

Music played as background music and in nightclubs can be among the most difficult to monitor. It seems inevitable that many smaller organizations will just stream music without paying for a license. Therefore, monitoring is like trying to pick a single note out of a sea of white noise.

The PROs themselves seem to acknowledge that there is no scientific way to monitor all plays, with the ASCAP website stating that it “relies on electronic logs, playlists, program guides and cue sheets for the necessary performance information.”

In some instances, armies of “paid listeners” are even sent out to monitor music performances in clubs, bars, and live music venues.

In the pre-digital age, PROs faced a difficult task — how to track the many different ways that music is consumed, from radios to shopping centers. As a result, royalty payments tended to be based on an educated guess of music consumption, rather than what was actually played. What was difficult, however, has now become impossible, as we will discover in the next article.

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