For decades, the cue sheet has been the least glamorous, most consequential document in audiovisual music. It records what music played, where, for how long, and in what context in a film, TV show, or ad and royalty distribution ultimately depends on it. CISAC itself describes the traditional cue sheet as historically fragmented, inconsistently formatted, and often incomplete, and that description is the real starting point for this story: a standards gap that created inefficiencies that could ultimately affect how accurately and efficiently creators and rights holders were paid.

The gap: a document built for one side of the business

Cue sheets grew up serving authors’ rights collection, the payments owed to composers, songwriters, and publishers whenever a production airs. What they were never built to carry was sound recording data, with no standard field for ISRCs, no consistent way to identify the performer or label behind a recording, and no shared vocabulary across the dozen-plus formats used by different societies, including CISAC’s own AVR, RapidCue, Soundmouse, and internal templates at ASCAP, BMI, GEMA, KODA, PRS, and SOCAN, among others.

That omission mattered because neighbouring rights work differently across territories. In the US, once a production pays the master use licence to embed a recording, that is typically the end of the recording side’s payment for that use, as US law generally does not create an additional performance royalty when the programme is subsequently broadcast or streamed domestically. Many other territories have different frameworks, where the broadcast or communication of that recording can trigger additional rights payments to performers and labels. The rules vary considerably by territory and type of use, but the underlying data problem was consistent. This income often relied on the same cue sheet infrastructure used for authors’ rights, without the recording metadata needed to reliably match a recording usage to the right performer, label, or payment. As a result, money could be delayed, distributed inaccurately, or remain unclaimed because there was no common identifier to work from.

The fix: Global Cue Sheet Standard 2.0

That gap is what brought the recording industry to the table. In September 2024, CISAC, the Society Publisher Forum, and, for the first time, IFPI, representing the international recording industry, released the Global Cue Sheet Standard 2.0, replacing the older Cue Sheet Standards and Rules. It consolidated data elements that had previously been scattered across AVR, RapidCue, Soundmouse, and various society formats into a common structure. More importantly, it introduced recording metadata alongside musical work data, creating a more complete data foundation for identifying recordings and supporting neighbouring rights collection alongside authors’ rights. (read more)

The advance: from standard to AVR+

A standard on its own still needs a technical format that software can read, and that is the gap AVR+ closes. Developed by CISAC’s Audiovisual Data Exchange group to put the Global Cue Sheet Standard 2.0 into practice, AVR+ launched in June 2026 as a machine-readable, implementation-ready technical format built on the 2.0 standard. It is structured as a JSON schema and is designed to enable automated cue sheet ingestion, reduce metadata gaps, and support consistent validation across production partners, rights databases, and royalty processing systems. In effect, it turns cue sheet data from a document that people read into structured information that systems can process automatically. (read more)

What’s genuinely fixed and what isn’t

Together, the two initiatives address three key gaps: fragmented cue-sheet formats, missing recording metadata, and the lack of a machine-readable structure for automated processing.

What they cannot solve on their own is adoption and underlying data quality. AVR+ enables structured processing and validation, but organisations still need processes to prepare and manage the data entering the exchange.

So does this really need a data management infrastructure? Yes and here’s why

The question is whether AVR+ adoption is primarily a format problem or a data problem wearing a format’s clothing. The answer is both, but the harder challenge is making the new format work with the data and systems already in place. AVR+ standardises how audiovisual music information is structured and exchanged, but the format itself cannot resolve every gap or inconsistency in the underlying data. A well-structured payload can still contain data that needs to be validated, transformed or reconciled before it can be effectively used downstream.

That’s where Noctil fits. Noctil can help organisations transform their existing data into AVR+ JSON, exchange it, and ingest and process AVR+ data within their existing workflows. Its data management and transformation capabilities provide the infrastructure to work with the new standard without requiring organisations to rebuild their existing systems around it.