Since the dawn of time, Production Coordinators worldwide have been pulling their hair out, reluctantly adhering to a mundane but important legal requirement. 

That is, the dreaded music cue sheet.

A hellish spreadsheet used to log every single second of music used in every single episode / programme of broadcast television, manually created in Excel over many painstaking hours, until finally, with dry, sore eyes, it is logged with a Performing Rights Organisation (PRO). In Australia, that’s APRA.

So what is a cue sheet? For those of you who don’t know, for every broadcast programme, there is a cue sheet containing a detailed list of all the musical cues used in that programme, including related copyright information for each track (e.g. production, episode, writer, publisher, duration of music used, identification codes etc).

Cue sheets travel around the world with productions providing broadcasters with an accurate record of the musical works used in their programming. Cue sheets are used in conjunction with broadcast records allowing PROs to accurately distribute royalties to composers and rights holders whose works have been broadcast on television.

The Problem

Let’s face it, after delivering your creative project, the last thing anyone wants to do is sit down for a week and manually complete music cue sheets. 

The Solution

The good news is, if you’re a Melodie Enterprise customer we can now take this laborious, complicated chore off your hands – for free!

How It Works

Melodie has created a simple, tech-enabled workflow, which removes all of the time intensive, manual components of creating a cue sheet.

From your edit timeline, simply export an .EDL file featuring only music (no dialogue, narration, sound effects etc), and send it to Melodie. From that file, we will populate a complete cue sheet, tailor made for your PRO of choice. 

Melodie tracks will have all data and fields fully populated, and non-Melodie tracks (including commissioned works) will simply contain the audio file name as a placeholder.

Note: we use the front half of the file names to search our database and populate data in the cue sheet so please ask your editors not to change the front of the file names! Also, please be sure to share the frame rate so we can properly calculate durations from timecode.

What was once a time intensive task is now quick, easy and free with Melodie.

The next time you need a music cue sheet created, get in touch with us by contacting: broadcast@melod.ie