Here’s a number worth sitting with for a moment: music publishing royalties topped $4.7 billion in the United States in 2021 alone. A significant portion of that money belongs to songwriters who never collected it, because they didn’t know the system existed, didn’t register properly, or simply assumed their distributor was handling it. They were wrong. Nobody is coming to find you. The money is sitting there waiting, and you have to go get it.
Here’s where to start.
What Music Publishing Actually Is
Music publishing is the business of ensuring songwriters and rights holders get paid when their compositions are used, performed, streamed, or licensed. Yet many artists don’t fully understand how it works or how much royalty revenue they may be missing by not having a publishing solution. The key distinction to understand from the beginning is that there are two separate copyrights in every recorded song: the composition, which is the melody and lyrics you wrote, and the sound recording, which is the specific recording of that composition. Publishing deals with the composition. Your distributor deals with the sound recording. They are not the same thing, they are not handled by the same people, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes an independent artist can make.
Performance Royalties and Your PRO
Every time your song is played on the radio, performed live, streamed, or broadcast in any public setting, it generates a performance royalty. Performance Rights Organisations collect these on your behalf. In the United States, the PROs are ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. In Canada, it’s SOCAN. Every country has its own PRO. You can only be affiliated with one PRO at a time, so choose carefully, register yourself as a songwriter, and register every song you write as a composition. Without that registration, the money goes unclaimed. Your PRO will not track you down. You track them down first.
Mechanical Royalties and the MLC
This is the one most independent artists miss entirely, and it is costing them real money. The Mechanical Licensing Collective, created by the Music Modernization Act of 2018, has paid out more than $3 billion since it began operating in 2021. The MLC is the only organization in the US that collects mechanical royalties from interactive streaming services. The only way to get these royalties is if either you or your publisher is signed up with the MLC. Songwriters cannot collect mechanical royalties simply by being a member of a PRO. On the flip side, songwriters cannot collect performance royalties simply by joining The MLC. They are two separate systems doing two separate jobs and you need both. Your distributor will not send you any mechanical royalties, so if you are an independent artist, register with a publishing service to collect them.
SoundExchange: The One Everyone Forgets
SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties for the master recording. This is one of the most commonly missed revenue streams for independent artists. If your music is played on Pandora, SiriusXM, internet radio, or any non-interactive digital radio service, SoundExchange is the organisation collecting those royalties on the recording side. It is separate from your PRO, separate from the MLC, and requires its own registration. All you have to do is send in a Letter of Direction to SoundExchange and you’ll be set up to receive your royalties. It takes minutes. There is no good reason not to do it.
Sync Royalties: The Big Payday
Synchronization royalties are paid when your musical composition is licensed for use in conjunction with visual media — a film, television show, commercial, video game, or YouTube video that requires a commercial license. Sync licensing is now the second-highest royalty stream for independent artists. Unlike performance and mechanical royalties, sync fees are negotiated directly rather than collected automatically, which means you either need a publisher pitching your music, a music library representing your catalogue, or the networking skills to get your songs in front of music supervisors yourself. When a placement lands, the upfront sync fee can be substantial, and the performance royalties that follow every time that film or show airs keep generating income long after the deal is signed.
The Publishing Administrator: The Missing Piece
If you are only with BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC but have not appointed a publishing administrator, you are likely missing part of your publishing income. A publishing administrator works alongside your PRO but covers additional revenue streams that the PRO does not, linking your compositions to dozens of global collection systems that your PRO alone cannot access. Services like Songtrust act as your publishing administrator without taking ownership of your music, collecting from collection societies across more than 200 countries and territories. The royalties checklist every independent artist needs covers PRO registration, publishing administration setup, mechanical rights organisation enrolment, distributor confirmation for digital royalties, metadata and credits, and SoundExchange signup for digital performance royalties. Work through that list before your next release, not after.
Metadata: The Invisible Foundation
None of this works if your metadata is wrong. Making sure your metadata and ISRC codes are accurate from day one is what ensures royalty payments get attributed correctly. Without proper registration and clean metadata, these royalties go uncollected regardless of how many streams your music earns. Your song title, your writer credits, your publisher information, your ISRC codes — every piece of that data is what connects your music to your money across every platform and every collection society in the world. Get it right before the music goes live, because fixing it after the fact is significantly harder and slower.
The music industry is not designed to make this easy. But it is not designed to be impossible either. Register with a PRO. Register with the MLC. Register with SoundExchange. Get a publishing administrator. Keep your metadata clean. Do all of that, and you will collect money that would otherwise sit in a system waiting for someone who never shows up.
Don’t be that person.