By Ethan Millman. The two Devo songs became ubiquitous on MTV for starkly different reasons, yet ironically the throughline behind their success is the same: the network needed to find a way to fill up airtime. Songwriters hope to make money through several different royalty streams, most reliably through performance royalties, a backend payment songwriters receive whenever their compositions are played on the radio, in public spaces like restaurants or concert venues, or in TV shows and movies.
They negotiate with television networks and streaming services to set rates, receive the money from the platforms and dole out royalties to their songwriters. Given the paucity of income many songwriters receive from streaming services, these royalties can play an outsized role in both their career and their pocket. The sitcom is one of the most successful TV shows of all time, airing new episodes on CBS for 12 years from to It secured a lucrative streaming deal with Max , and with its syndication deal on TBS, it typically airs on TV between four and seven hours a day.
Adding further to his payday, Robertson says that amid the ongoing catalog boom, he sold some of the rights to the theme, though he declined to say how much he sold it for or who purchased it. Justin Shukat is the president of Primary Wave Publishing, the company that owns the music rights of the late legendary songwriter Allee Willis.
A show like The Office β which similarly plays on TV for hours a day while drawing huge streaming numbers β likely nets similar figures, while long-running soap operas like General Hospital and The Young and the Restless that continue to air daily are quietly some of the biggest earners.
The king, according to many who spoke for this article, is composer Mike Post, whose music can be heard on Law and Order and its various spinoffs. Yet a theme on a more nominally popular program can still net a songwriter a stable living, and significantly more than their attempts to break into pop music.
