If you are not already familiar with cue-sheets and public performance rules, we recommend you take few minutes to read this page, because it's an issue that's worth understanding for anybody involved in media production.
If you're having problems finding the information you need for your cue-sheet, feel free to call us or email us, and we will be happy to help.
Please save and print a copy of the filled-in cue-sheet.
When you send your production to a broadcasting company, always make sure a copy of the cue-sheet is included along with the film.
Send a copy of the cue-sheet to us at: info@shockwave-sound.com .
But is it, or isn't it, "Royalty-Free"?
It may seem wrong that "royalty free music" still generates performance royalties to the composer and publisher, when the music is broadcast. But this is how it works, and you'll find the same thing no matter where you should purchase royalty free music. The broadcasters always pay an annual fee for their right to broadcast music. This annual fee is the same, regardless of whether they play music by composers who are registered with a performance rights organization, or by composers who aren't.
So why call it "royalty-free music"? Well, in regular "not royalty-free" music, you would have to pay us a royalty for each time you used the music, or for each month/year you had access to it. Our music is as royalty-free as any music can ever get. There is no getting around the broadcasters' annual fee to performance royalties organizations.
Performance royalties don't really have anything to do with Shockwave-Sound.Com as such. Performance royalties aren't paid to Shockwave-Sound. They are paid from the broadcaster, via the performance royalties collection agency as an annual fee, and then divided among composers. It has nothing to do with Shockwave-Sound, other than us providing you with information about the composers and publishers of the music you purchase.
Unfortunately, every year a huge amount of music is being broadcast where no cue-sheet for that music existed. This doesn't mean that the broadcaster's annual fee is reduced in any way. They still pay the same amount. But when no cue-sheet is filed, the money goes into a "surplus pool" which, at the end of the year, is divided on a percentage scale between already high-earning pop artists -- those who already make the highest amounts of performance royalties. So the broadcast may have contained music by one of our composers, but the money that should rightfully have been paid to him, has instead gone to pop artists like Pharrell Williams and Miley Cyrus. And that's just not right. This is why we ask that cue-sheets be correctly filed when music by our composers are used in a broadcast.