Of course, it will be very easy to monitor the performance of the song if it is aired in commercial radio, big commercial/entertainment establishments, major college radio stations as well as the major television stations. The reason is that they have extensively wide and popular media coverage which ASCAP/BMI and SESAC monitoring systems can easily tap and get performance data.

The only problem I have seen is that the main players in this market are also the big players. This means it will be relatively easy for major recording label and film/movie distributor to expose their records or work in these established, wide and popular media coverage because of advertising money.

Why this is such as problem is that, majority of songwriters and even independently small publishers like me cannot even have access or has slim chances of having the recorded material be aired/performed in those stations. This is not a problem for me because I know a lot of ways to promote music but it can be a problem to majority of the independent songwriters/publishers who have song performance far beyond what ASCAP/BMI and SESAC can monitor. For example, small and independent publishers like me have small number of clients in a relatively remote environment being very far from the mainstream. It means that even song performance occurs; it may not be counted by ASCAP/BMI and SESAC. This situation can be possible, for example if someone licenses my song to include in a short indie movie which will be aired or released in a city or very small country, or even producers that work themselves and does not even submit cue sheets, then a song performance cannot be monitored, it means the associated writers/publishers cannot be paid.

There are a lot of similar situations like the one above not only applicable to indie films. Or even at times when your song gets cut to be included a workout video which will be publicly performed in a city work out gym in a daily basis for 60 straight years. And gym owners might get money but the performance societies might be completely clueless to these song performance activities.
What’s the role of the music consumer? The main role is to report performance records to the writer/publisher performing right societies.

Take the initiative to submit cue sheets or file performance report, this helps the writer/publisher gets paid like the consumer might be earning well for the use of music.

Luckily, some will report but some will not. For those that do not report and they are earning money for the use of songs without paying public performance royalties, chances are time will come when truth might come out and you have only two choices:

a. Pay the enormous amount of unpaid royalties in years of usage.
b. Close your business and go bankrupt.

This is how the cue sheet will look like:

You can read more about cue sheets here: http://www.ascap.com/playback/2005/winter/features/cuesheets.aspx