Most explanations of sync money stop at “you get a sync fee and a master fee.” That is the smallest and least interesting part. The money that matters arrives later, from a different place, and depends on paperwork you may never see — which is why writers with real placements sometimes wait a year and then get a payment they cannot account for.
This is the whole chain, in order, written from the songwriter's side.
Every placement licenses two separate things, and if you wrote and recorded it yourself you are being paid twice for one song:
These are normally quoted at the same amount, so a “$4,000 placement” often means $2,000 each side. If you are signed to a publisher, your share of the sync side is split per your deal; if a label owns the master, that half is not yours at all. Read which number you are being quoted before celebrating.
Ranges are wide and depend on the show's budget, how prominently the music is used, the term and territory, and whether it is exclusive. Rough shape, per side:
| Use | Typical range, per side | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Student / indie film | $0–500 | Often festival-only rights; frequently free for credit |
| Streaming or cable series, background | $500–3,000 | The bread and butter of most sync careers |
| Series, featured or main-title | $5,000–25,000+ | Prominence changes the number more than anything else |
| National TV commercial | $10,000–150,000+ | Term, territory and exclusivity drive this |
| Trailer | $15,000–100,000+ | Usually custom or heavily reworked |
| Video game | $1,000–15,000 | Often buyout with no performance backend |
Treat these as orientation, not a rate card. The single biggest variable is prominence: the same song under dialogue and over a closing scene are different negotiations.
The sync fee is the upfront. For television, the recurring money comes from performance royalties, collected by your PRO — ASCAP, BMI or SESAC in the US — every time the episode airs or streams in a territory that reports.
This is often where a placement's real value sits. A background cue in a show that runs for years in international syndication can quietly out-earn its sync fee several times over. It is also the money most commonly lost, for one reason:
Practical consequences:
So a placement that airs in March may generate its first backend payment the following year. Budget accordingly, and do not read silence as failure.
None of this is legal advice, and a music attorney is worth the money on anything with a large number attached.
All of the above assumes you got the placement. Getting it usually comes down to answering a brief quickly with songs that actually fit — and past a few hundred songs, that stops being something you can do from memory. Pitchkit indexes your catalog by listening to it, then ranks every song you have against any brief you paste. Free for your first 100 songs.
Download free — 100 songsIt depends far more on prominence and usage than on the song. Background cues in streaming and cable series commonly run $500 to $3,000 per side, featured or main-title placements $5,000 to $25,000 or more, national commercials $10,000 to $150,000 and up, and indie or student films often little or nothing. 'Per side' matters: a placement licenses the composition and the master separately, usually at similar amounts, so an independent writer who owns both is paid twice.
These are orientation ranges rather than a rate card. Term, territory, exclusivity and how audibly the music is used move the number more than any other factors.
A cue sheet is the document a production files listing every piece of music used, who wrote and publishes it, and exactly how long each cue played. Performance rights organizations pay performance royalties from that document, so it is the mechanism that turns an air date into money in your account.
It matters because it is where placements quietly stop paying. If your song is missing from the cue sheet, or your writer and publisher details are wrong, no performance royalty reaches you, and nothing about the placement itself will alert you. Registering the song with your PRO before it airs, asking the supervisor for a copy of the cue sheet, and reconciling your statements against your placements are the three habits that prevent it.
They collect the backend, not the upfront. The sync fee and master use fee are negotiated directly and paid by the production; your PRO plays no part in that. What your PRO does is collect performance royalties every time the episode or film is broadcast or streamed in a territory that reports, paying from the cue sheet the production filed.
For television in particular, that backend can exceed the original sync fee over the life of a show, which is why registering the composition correctly and on time matters as much as negotiating the fee. Any of the three US PROs collects sync-related performance income; the differences between them are about payout formulas, membership terms and service rather than about whether sync gets collected.
The upfront fees are usually invoiced when the licence is signed and paid on 30 to 90 day terms, which is the fast part. The backend is slow: the episode may air months after the licence, the production then files a cue sheet, your PRO processes it on a quarterly cycle typically two to three quarters behind the performance, and foreign collection adds a year or more on top.
A placement that airs in March can realistically produce its first performance payment the following year. That lag is normal and is not a sign something has gone wrong — but if a placement never appears on a statement at all, that is worth chasing, because a missing cue sheet entry does not fix itself.
Usually yes for the upfront fees, because those are typically owed on execution of the licence rather than on the music actually airing — but this is exactly the kind of thing to confirm in the agreement rather than assume, since some licences are contingent on use.
What you will not get is backend. Performance royalties are generated by actual broadcasts and streams, so a cue that never airs never appears on a cue sheet and never generates performance income. That is one reason featured placements in shows that actually run are worth disproportionately more than the fee alone suggests.
Only if the fee reflects what you are giving up. Exclusivity means you cannot license that song to anyone else for the term, in the territories covered, which can remove a song from your catalog's earning potential for years. Combined with 'in perpetuity, worldwide, all media', it is close to selling that song's sync future for one payment.
Non-exclusive licences are the norm for most placements and let the same song earn repeatedly, which is where sync income actually compounds. When exclusivity is genuinely required — commercials and trailers often insist — the price should rise substantially, and anything with a large number attached is worth a music attorney's time.
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