ASCAP Jumps on Digital Fingerprinting Bandwagon

ASCAP

Composers and Publishers signed up with ASCAP will be seeing an increase in their radio and local TV royalty revenues thanks to the PRO's recent partnership with audio fingerprinting service Soundmouse.

Based in the UK, Soundmouse provides digital fingerprinting services similar to TuneSat, used extensively by SESAC over the last few years to track music performances over multiple media streams.

While it remains to be seen which of the two digital services--TuneSat or Soundmouse--report the most performances, there are several factors that shift the actual payouts from that data with each PRO.

ASCAP takes Soundmouse's data and compares it with their Sample Survey to determine a song's royalty payout, due in part to ASCAP's current broadcast licensing deals being based on their Sample Survey's historically resulting payouts. This could change in the future, but for now think of Soundmouse as a performance data cross-referencing tool for ASCAP.

The good news is that MAM clients have already seen a revenue increase for performances appearing on radio and local TV since ASCAP began using Soundmouse's service.

To facilitate Soundmouse's fingerprinting, ASCAP Writers and Publishers must now send MAM the following for every work to be registered:

• a music-only MP3 file, AND

• an AV file of the commercial, including VO (rough cut is fine).

Your MAM Account Manager will be contacting you in the next few weeks to go over ASCAP's new submission requirements. If you have any immediate questions, please feel free to give your Account Manager a shout: we're here to walk you through it all. The good news is that ASCAP is at last thoroughly gathering the data it needs to pay out on radio and local TV: three cheers for that!