The second season of NBC’s The Voice is well underway, and Nashville’s considerable talent pool is being represented so far by three singers.

Early in the season, North Dakota-born singer/songwriter Gwen Sebastian landed a spot on team Blake Shelton by delivering a stirring rendition of Sugarland’s “Stay.” Blake commented, “Hey listen, you are a great country vocalist. You have every quality. You are tender in the right places, and you are powerful in the right places, and it matches the lyrics. I just think you really know what you are doing. You have a great sound and you’re developed.” Sebastian will also be blogging about the experience on the show on gactv.com.

If Sebastian’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she actually had a little success on MusicRow’s CountryBreakout Chart back in 2010 with a single called “Hard Rain.” She’s currently being represented by Flying Island Entertainment.

Additionally, Team Blake picked up Nashville resident Brian Fuente after his audition with the Grace Potter song “Paris (Ooh La La).” Fuente moved to town in 2007 and is a self-taught guitarist who formerly fronted the rock band Newmatic.

Also representing Music City is Nicolle Galyon, who turned in a performance of Kenny Chesney’s “You Save Me.” This time around, judge Adam Levine was the one to pounce, and selected Galyon for his team. See the audition here.

Galyon, a Kansas native, is a graduate of Belmont University and Warner/Chappell songwriter who has penned songs for Laurena Alaina, Josh Kelley, and Brent Anderson. She’s also a classically trained pianist and played Belmont’s yearly showcase The Best of the Best while she was a student.

A Belmont University representative also informs us that three other alumni are part of this season. Contestants Katrina Parker (Team Adam), Hailey Steele (of The Line, Team Christina) and Tony Vincent (Team Cee-Lo) all previously lived in Nashville and attended Belmont at some point in time.

Go Nashville!

TuneSat is a service provider that monitors television and internet sites for copyright usage using fingerprint technology.  It provides near real-time reporting to content owners showing all performances that were detected with the date, time, channel, show, episode, composition, duration of time played, as well as, the recording of the captured performance as proof positive of the use. For internet usage, TuneSat reports the website, the hosting site, and contact information. TuneSat also provides reports comparing detected performance with royalty statements showing variances between the two.

MusicRow recently sat down exclusively with Chris Woods, Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of TuneSat for a candid discussion about this innovative company and the services offered from its audio fingerprinting technology. Woods, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music, has created music branding packages for numerous television networks, including Fox Sports, Versus and Big Ten. As a music composer himself, Woods knows first-hand the challenges of music royalty licensing and collection issues which led him to co-found TuneSat in 2007.

MusicRow: The royalty payment process requires the licensee to obtain a license in order to report all the music they use to the PROs (Performance Rights Organizations) which then triggers the royalty payment. What led you to that moment where you believed you had something to offer?

Woods: We conducted case studies over a decade with majors, indies, and small composers like myself to compare detected performance data on television to performance royalties and found empirically that between 60 and up to 80% of music on television is never reported to the societies. In this day and age, technology has the ability to resolve this issue. We decided to start a service for all content owners to be able to know exactly when and where their music is playing.

MusicRow: What was the first step in offering such a service?

Woods: We established a monitoring facility and secured our own technology to constantly listen to 109 national network broadcasters in the US for performances of our clients master recordings in our fingerprint database.

MusicRow: What is the biggest issue with a content owner identifying usage of the copyright?

Woods: The problem with television and other technologies is you have to be able to identify music when it’s buried under dialogue, sounds affect, crowd noise, etc.. We can identify any 3 seconds of a broadcast to make a positive identification with the master recording.

MusicRow: What advice to you give content owners regarding being a curator of their copyrights?

Woods: You have to be business minded.  You have to understand what your rights are, understand where the money comes from and keep track of it. We see ourselves as a tool that music rights owners can use to help them track down that money.

MusicRow: Where does the Nashville music industry fit into the strategic initiatives of TuneSat?

Woods: One of our main initiatives is to get to the songwriter community and let them know we exist and how we can help them. Nashville is a great market for us and one we are heavily pursuing. A lot of the initiatives for us are to be more part of the Nashville organizations and embrace the different societies here. We really want to work with everyone to understand what the challenges are and how we can help monetize their music.

MusicRow: With the sheer expansiveness of the internet, is it something you can actually monitor?

Woods: Everyone knows their music is misused on the internet but finding it, resolving it, dealing with it– it’s a complete mess. Our answer to that is, “yes you can monitor the internet,” and we’re going to do in a way that no one else can. We are monitoring millions of websites around the world for the use of our clients music regardless of whether it’s a hotel website in Italy or a real estate website in Switzerland.  We are going to find the music, detect it, and provide our clients with that information.

MusicRow: Do you see where your service has been successful?

Woods: We’ve recovered millions of dollars on behalf of our clients that have used our information.

Subscribers can sign up online and can choose monitoring of television, internet or both. Customers include record labels, publishers, and individual memberships. Rates are based on amount of content and start at $10 per month for monitoring of up to 10 songs. In the event of a royalty discrepancy, TuneSat subscribers can pursue the claim themselves, or hire the company’s newly-launched Administrative Services branch to pursue unlicensed and unpaid uses of their music.

For more information, visit www.tunesat.com.