“Royalty free” is most commonly used to describe music where you buy a license for a track or sound and you are free to use that track as many times and as long as you want (under the terms of the license). It has nothing to do with performance royalties, that would be a performance royalty free license, or whatever you wanna call it.
Audiojungle used to be a performance royalty free library, since they didn’t allow the composers to register their music with a PRO.
It would actually be interesting to hear why Envato calls the music on AJ royalty free, since the license only allow the buyer to use the item in one end product and they have to buy a new license for each use…
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Thank you for the answer!
Does it mean that buyers pay twice: once for the license and the second time for the royalty?
I thought the license you bought is the royalty for a track.
I would like to know the answer to this, if any registered author would be willing to answer.
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A bit simplified: Performance royalties are only paid if the track is broadcasted. Those royalties are paid by the broadcaster, who usually aren’t the same person as the buyer. The broadcaster usually pays those royalties anyway, whether your music is PRO registered or not, so registering your music is just a way of collecting that money.
99.9% of the time the buyer isn’t affected by this.
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Got it! Thank you for the clarifying, @Hyperprod! The banner on AJ’s homepage “Royalty free music and audio tracks from $1” confused me.
So the answer for the @DynaMIC-Sound-Produc’s question posed above is interesting for me too.
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For example I’ve received today 400$ only for one Polish commercial and only from Polish public tv stations. Keep in mind that the rest of royalties from commercial tv stations will be paid in next few months and I suppose the payment will be much bigger. And of course there is more commercial tv stations than public in Poland. Compare it to 100-200$ from AJ for one license.
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If they don’t broadcast it, etc. they don’t have to pay royalties to PRO. There is everything in Envato PRO help here: https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/208477896-Buyer-s-Guide-to-Performing-Rights-Organizations-and-P-R-O-Music
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But they can’t broadcast it with Standard license. That’s what i mean.
Wow. They registered their tracks in Spanish PRO and they went jail? Please explain me how this can happen? Maybe they made some huge and obvious plagiarism? I haven’t heard about this.
Buyers do not pay twice. Broadcaster pays it and it’s obligatory - that’s another thing why broadcasting is so expansive for “buyers”.
The only one thing buyer have to do is filling the cue with you name on it. So if you are in PRO or not - royalties have to be paid by a broadcaster, not buy buyer.
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But keep in mind, that buyers sometimes buy wrong license and they are broadcasting it illegally. You can track them or not, but still - being registered to PRO makes you can get extra cash or even find those commercials.
I see that there is lack of knowledge of how it works. So this can be helpful:
Yes i know and i agree, thank you for your valuable enlightenment!
I just want to make sure i understand it all correctly that in theory if buyer purchased a standard license he never deal with a P.R.O.
Tunesat found one commercial with my music aired 256 times on Sky news, BBC, Comedy Central, National Geographic… What should I expect roughly? Is it 100+$, 500+$, 1000+$, 5000+$?
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Depends a lot of which channel, which programm, which hours and audiance ( an evening 9pm show pay more than a 7am show because of audiance) and how many seconds it’s used.
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It can take up to 2 years for the money to get to you, but if the broadcaster or the production company didn’t use your IPI Number, then 0$ is what you’ll get. I have around 500 placements of my Audiojungle portfolio spotted trough tunesat.
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90% of detected stuff are big UK televisions. I got audio samples, and most of it was broadcasted during the commercial brakes on shows like Big bang theory, Ellen, Californication etc.
My music plays for about 25 seconds each time
This is the screenshot from TuneSat. I’m using free package, so if I want to see all detections, I must upgrade my account. Should I send this to BMI? Can they check if it’s reported properly?
It depends on your PRO. Some of them like Tunesat, some not. But for sure you can check this with PRO (using even text data from Tunesat) - they will tell you if you have royalties from this broadcasts or not. If not - they will contact broadcaster and they will get your cash.
How much money you will receive for this? I have no idea, it varies. But it looks like it can be very worthy.
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Ok that’s good. If you wanna upgrade your Tunesat account it’s 187$ per month for Europe/US. I definitely don’t think it worth it. Tunesat membership is made for big music publishers who’ve got thousands of tracks. You can create multiple free acounts with few tracks.
For money like I said it varies a lot. Generally we can say you will be paid from 1$ to 2$ each second.
But for example last time i’ve got my music on french channel Arte, just 18 seconds and I was paid 105€ for it. So it’s very difficult to say. 
Yes you have to contact BMI. And ask them how to do it. But I don’t know them I am with SACEM.
All this tv streams are just with Audiojungle ?