My name is Kubeshni Pillay from Urban Brew Studios. I’m the Music Royalties and Admin Manager.
My role mainly involves notifying musical works by our in-house composers to the relevant CMOs. Our department also ensures that all music used in productions is properly licensed and approved before it goes to air. We start by looking at the approved music budget before any decisions are made.
SAMRO and CAPASSO have blanket licences in place for SABC and DStv channels, so we usually make use of their catalogues for production music. If commercial music is required, we need to obtain permission before it can be used.
For streaming platforms like Netflix, productions generally have a bigger music budget. This covers both production and commercial music, but we still need to manage costs carefully as commercial music can be quite expensive.
When it comes to commercial music, we need both master and sync clearances. Part of our job is tracking ownership. The master is usually 100% owned by one publisher, while sync can be more complicated if there are multiple composers and ownership splits. In those cases, we need to identify all the composers and agree on the costs.
For example, if a song like Meghan Trainor’s “Dear Future Husband” is to be used in a Netflix production: Sony owns 100% of the master, while the sync is split 50/50 between Downtown and Rezvin Music. An agreement could be reached at R100,000 for the master, and R50,000 each for Downtown and Rezvin Music. So the total cost for usage of this song would be R200K.
We use a music tracker to keep track of all costs and ensure everything stays within budget. Once the episodes are approved, we then receive the music cue sheets from post.The Editor or final mix assists us with the Libraries used for each piece of music used as we need to indicate the Artist, Composer and Publisher used on the cue sheet. Every piece of music used needs to be accounted for. SABC cue sheets are done in Excel, DStv cue sheets are processed on the ReCue system, and Netflix cue sheets are processed on Cue Trak. These cue sheets are submitted to the relevant Broadcasters and Platforms who submits to the CMO’s and that’s how Royalties gets paid out.
We keep track of our Productions and we do a forecast of what is expected so when Royalties gets paid out, we ensure that all is paid. We liaise a lot with Samro and Capasso as they don’t always pay what they are supposed to.