Some of you may have heard of the service Competitrack, or even their new parent company Numerator. It’s a tool that provides detailed information about commercials and TV spots that run in the USA and Canada. In tandem with Tunesat, Competitrack can help you fill in all the missing information needed to make a manual claim to your PRO and track down unpaid performance royalties.
If you go to Numerator’s website, it doesn’t look all that friendly and open to us authors anymore. However I reached out last week and have now been given a login. Usually their service is targeted at advertisers and is provided as a paid service, however I’ve been told that they still give free accounts to music composers.
I definitely recommend anyone who has sold a few broadcast licenses to the US or Canada to sign up and use it to your advantage. What I do is begin with a Tunesat detection, try and work out the product being advertised / other info, and then use this information to track down the details in Competitrack. PROs don’t often accept Tunesat detections, but with Competitrack you’ll have plenty of information to work with.
Say you’re a composer of production music and you’re interested in an account to monitor commercials and TV spots using your music. Then someone should be in contact with you shortly!
EDIT: it appears to scan international spots, so even better!
I just joined it. I have a question… when you find an ad, do you pay for download report? What information does that report include? In the search results page I see ad code, occurrences, first and last run and if the clearance is local, national or both. Can you see more details in a report? Is it important? Thanks!
Thanks for your answer. I’m trying for the ad with code ASPCAS-1263 (825 Occurrences), but I can’t download the report. It’s USA based. Maybe it’s because I’m not from USA?
Does it ask you to pay for the report? I have never tried downloading a report before. I usually just copy and paste the data that the tool gives me. I’m not from the USA either
Well, I can see some data without downloading the report (ad code, number of occurrences, first and last run and if the clearance is local, national or both), but I’m just curious about the data that the downloadable and paid report contains. For example, to get an idea of how many of the airing has been national wide, hours and channels , and so on. I don’t know if these data are in the report.
I’m going to ask them because in some cases it can be interesting for me to have it. Thanks for your help.
EDIT: After writing this post I’ve realized that I wrote about SoundMouse. I suppose you said that about use of Numerator (?). BTW Numerator does not collect info about international spots anymore.
Actually how can you say if it has any positive impact or not?
Soundmouse helps broadcasters and PROs in finding correct composer and track name and PRO assositations. Of course it can work only if broadcaster or pro have a contract with Soundmouse. And after broadcaster/pro finds data, they should find you.
Unfortunately composers are not allowed to see reports and simply are not able to see whether Soundmouse found something or not. And whether broadcaster or pro used this report or not.
Soundmouse is very important on some broadcast fields. For example ASCAP uses only Soundmouse to get reports from wide range of smaller TV channels. Solely. Only. They do not use any paper or digital cue sheets. So if you don’t use Soundmouse, they can’t find you and send royalties. I do not remember correctly but I suppose that ASCAP uses it on other fields as well. I see in my ASCAP statements that they probably use it for real though it is hard for me yet to say how efficient it is exactly.
BTW why “this topic will be automatically closed in 3 days”? @KingDog? I think it should be opened forever to allow authors to discuss about it now and in the future.
