Where the money comes from: every royalty stream, named

29 · 2026-08-27 · 15 min read · Español

A released record earns through seven streams, and a distributor statement carries one of them. Every stream comes from one of two copyrights — the song or the recording — and each is collected by a different organisation that pays only the people registered with it. None of it arrives automatically. This is the map: what pays, which copyright it comes from, who collects it in the United States and in Canada, and where your name has to be for any of it to reach you.

• Every music royalty comes from one of two copyrights: the musical work, which is the song, or the sound recording, which is the master.
• One interactive stream generates three separate payments — one on the recording side, two on the song side — collected by three different organisations.
• In the United States, mechanical royalties for streams and downloads route through The MLC, performance royalties through a performing rights organisation, and digital performance royalties for the recording through SoundExchange.
• United States copyright gives sound recordings no general public performance right, so AM/FM radio pays the song’s owners and pays the recording’s owner nothing. Canada pays performers and makers for the same play, through Re:Sound.
• A sync placement has no collecting society and no statutory rate. It is negotiated with the owner of each copyright, or it does not happen.

Which copyright is the money coming from?

Every royalty comes from one of two copyrights — the musical work, which is the song, or the sound recording, which is the master.

Two copyrights, two sets of owners, two sets of collectors. Who ends up owning each of them is a question with its own piece, and it is the one to settle before this one.

What matters here is narrower and nobody says it out loud: no organisation on this page collects for both. Each one is built around a single copyright, licenses a single set of uses, and keeps a single membership list.

So a writer who also performs is owed on both sides and has to go and collect each side from a different building. One registration does not reach across. That is not an oversight in the system. That is the shape of the system, and every section below is one door in it.

What does one stream actually pay, and to whom?

One interactive stream pays three times: a recording royalty to the master’s owner, and two more — mechanical and performance — to the song’s owners.

Three payments, three organisations, three schedules, for one person pressing play on a bus.

The recording side is the one you already see. The service licensed the master, and that money reaches you through your distributor, less whatever comes off it first — your co-owners’ shares, the distributor’s cut, and a producer’s points if any were agreed.

The song side splits in two, and this is where the money goes quiet. A stream is a reproduction and a performance at the same time, and United States law licenses each of those separately.

The reproduction half is the mechanical. Under section 115, a digital music provider “may, by complying with the terms and conditions of this subsection, obtain a blanket license from copyright owners through the mechanical licensing collective.” The MLC is that collective, and it describes the arrangement in one line: “Each month, digital service providers (DSPs) that operate under the blanket license send usage data and royalties to The MLC for all the music streamed and downloaded on their services.”

The performance half belongs to a performing rights organisation. Section 101 defines what performing a work “publicly” means, and the second half of the definition is the part that matters:

to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.

Separate places, different times. That is a stream, described exactly.

Why the recording-side number is the size it is — streamshare, the thousand-stream floor, the months of reporting lag — is its own piece, and this is not it. What matters here is that the other two payments were never on that statement and were never going to be.

Who pays performance royalties for the song?

A performing rights organisation collects them — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or GMR in the United States, SOCAN in Canada — and pays whoever is registered with it.

One right covers a startling amount of ground. Section 106 gives the owner of a musical work the exclusive right, “in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly” — and with section 101’s definition behind it, a radio broadcast, a television cue, a bar’s playlist, a festival stage and a Spotify stream are all the same right being exercised five ways.

The PRO licenses that right in bulk and splits the fee. BMI states both ends of it plainly: “A BMI music performance license grants businesses the right to publicly perform BMI affiliated music,” and “Your licensing fee goes to BMI’s affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers in the form of royalties.” SOCAN says the same thing from the member’s end: “A performing right is the right to perform musical works in public or communicate them to the public by telecommunication,” which members assign to SOCAN to administer and enforce for them.

Two things fall out of that, and both cost people money every year.

The registration is yours to do, and it is not your distributor’s job. A PRO pays its own members. If you have never signed up, the performance money for your own songs has been collected and distributed with your name nowhere in it. And the registration asks first who counts as a writer on the song, which is a question with a real answer rather than a formality.

Your own shows pay, and almost nobody claims it. SOCAN asks members to file a Notification of Live Performance with proof of the show — a ticket stub, a programme, a contract — within one year of the date, and pays it out in a quarterly distribution. The venue’s licence fee has already been paid. The only thing standing between it and you is a form saying which songs were played.

Who pays mechanical royalties for the song?

In the United States, The MLC pays mechanical royalties for streams and downloads; in Canada, CMRRA and SOCAN both administer reproduction rights.

A mechanical royalty is the money the song’s owners are paid when the song is reproduced — pressed onto a record, downloaded, or streamed. Section 115 sets the terms:

A person may by complying with the provisions of this section obtain a compulsory license to make and distribute phonorecords of a nondramatic musical work, including by means of digital phonorecord delivery.

Compulsory means the song’s owner is not asked. The MLC “administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services in the United States” and pays self-administered songwriters, publishers, administrators and collective management organisations. Its membership is open to “Anyone entitled to receive digital audio mechanical royalties for use of their music in the U.S.”

The edge of that blanket licence is worth knowing, because a lot of self-releasing artists are standing on it. The Copyright Office bounds it in one sentence: “Title I establishes a blanket licensing system for digital music providers to make and distribute digital phonorecord deliveries (e.g., permanent downloads, limited downloads, or interactive streams).” A CD and a record are neither. Physical mechanicals sit outside the blanket licence and are settled with the copyright owner directly.

Canada runs it with two doors rather than one. CMRRA handles “mechanical (reproduction) royalties” both for “songs used by platforms that offer audio-only streams, downloads or webcasts” and for “the reproduction of songs on CD, vinyl, or any physical product,” on behalf of “music publishers and self-published songwriters.” And SOCAN — which most people file under performance and stop — says on its own page: “In addition to administering performing rights, SOCAN can represent your reproduction rights on virtually every type of audio, audiovisual, digital or physical media.”

Two organisations, one right, and you choose. What you cannot do is assume the performing-rights registration you did in 2021 covered it, because it did not.

Who pays for the recording itself when it plays in public?

In the United States, SoundExchange pays for noninteractive digital services only; in Canada, Re:Sound pays performers and makers for broadcast and public performance.

SoundExchange collects and distributes digital performance royalties from platforms like Pandora, SiriusXM and iHeartRadio — the fees, in its own words, “that service providers such as Pandora, SiriusXM, and webcasters are required by law to pay for streaming musical content.” Required by law is exact rather than rhetorical: section 114 makes those services subject to statutory licensing, so they never ask, and SoundExchange is the single door that money comes through.

Now the part nobody volunteers. The same section limits what a sound recording copyright contains, and a general public performance right is not in it. AM/FM radio therefore pays the song’s writers and publishers, through the PRO, and pays the people who made the record nothing. Not less. Nothing.

Cross the border and the same play is a different transaction. Canada gives performers and makers a right to be paid when a published recording is performed in public or communicated to the public, and section 19(2) of the Copyright Act names who collects it:

… a person who performs a published sound recording in public or communicates it to the public by telecommunication is liable to pay royalties (a) in the case of a sound recording of a musical work, to the collective society authorized under Part VII.1 to collect them…

Not to you. To the society. Re:Sound is that society — “the Canadian not-for-profit music licensing company dedicated to obtaining fair compensation for artists and record companies for their performance rights” — collecting the fees “that music users such as radio stations, music streaming services and businesses that use recorded music must legally pay in order to publicly use your sound recordings.”

How each of these divides between the featured artist, the non-featured performers and the rights owner is set out share by share in the credits piece. What is settled here is the address.

Why does nobody collect sync money for you?

No compulsory licence reaches a sync placement, so a sync fee is negotiated with the owner of each copyright or it does not exist.

Every stream above this section has a collector because a statute put one there. Sync has neither a statute nor a collector, and the reason is two definitions sitting next to each other.

Section 115 licenses “phonorecords of a nondramatic musical work.” Section 101 says what a phonorecord is:

“Phonorecords” are material objects in which sounds, other than those accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work, are fixed by any method now known or later developed…

Read those together. The moment the sound accompanies picture, the object stops being a phonorecord, and the compulsory licence has nothing to say about it. The recording side arrives at the same place by a shorter road: section 115 refuses a compulsory licence “for the use of the work in the making of phonorecords duplicating a sound recording fixed by another.” Nobody gets a statutory licence to your master.

So a film, an advertisement, a game or a series needs one licence for the song and one for the recording, negotiated with whoever holds each. There is no rate. There is no society. There is no register that finds this money and forwards it: a sync fee arrives because a person asked and somebody answered, or it does not arrive at all.

Which makes this the one row on the map where being findable is the entire strategy. A supervisor works out who to ask from the metadata attached to the recording. If your name is not on it anywhere they can reach, the ask goes to a record where it is.

Where does the money go when nobody claims it?

Royalties a collector cannot match to a registered owner are held as unmatched, and unclaimed accrued mechanicals are eventually paid out to other copyright owners.

This is the money people mean when they say black box, and in the United States the mechanism is written down rather than rumoured. Section 115 requires the collective to hold unmatched accrued royalties for “not less than 3 years after the date on which the funds were received,” and then to distribute them to the copyright owners identified in its records “based on data indicating the relative market shares” of those owners.

Your money does leave the pool. It leaves under somebody else’s name.

Market share is the phrase to sit with. A pool distributed by market share goes to the largest catalogues, because that is what market share measures. Nobody is stealing anything; the rule is published, the holding period is in the statute, and the only variable in the whole arrangement is whether your name was in the records before the three years ran out.

There is a second way money sits still, and it is the opposite problem — not no claimant but two. When two people claim the same share, a register does not pick a winner. It holds the money and waits, which is exactly the machinery an unsigned split sheet sets running.

Which of these are you actually registered for?

Each collector on this page pays only the people registered with it, so the check that matters is a list of registrations, not of streams.

Seven rows, because that is how this page divides the money; other maps cut the same total differently. What does not change is the last column.

Go down that last column and mark the rows where your name is not on file anywhere. Those are not streams you are owed less on. They are streams that have been paying out for as long as your catalogue has existed, to a list you are not on, and every year you stay off it is a year of your money pissed into somebody else’s market share.

Then check the money that did arrive against your own register, in the order failures propagate — the six checks against a statement for the current one, and the audit for the whole catalogue. One column tonight, though. Find the empty rows first, because they are the ones nobody is going to mention.

FAQ

Does registering with a PRO cover mechanical royalties too?

No. A performing rights organisation collects performance royalties for the musical work and nothing else. In the United States, mechanical royalties for streams and downloads route through The MLC; in Canada, reproduction rights are administered by CMRRA or by SOCAN, which is a separate service from its performing-rights membership.

Does your distributor collect any of these for you?

A distributor collects the recording royalties from the stores it delivers to, and no other stream on this page arrives through it. Mechanical, performance, digital performance and neighbouring-rights money is collected by other organisations that pay their own members directly.

Does US radio pay you anything for the recording?

No. United States copyright gives sound recordings no general public performance right, so an AM or FM broadcast pays the song’s writers and publishers through a performing rights organisation and pays the recording’s owner and performers nothing. Canada pays performers and makers for the same broadcast, through Re:Sound.

What happens to royalties nobody claims?

They are held as unmatched. Under the United States blanket licence, accrued royalties that stay unclaimed are held for not less than three years and are then distributed to the copyright owners in the collective’s records, in proportion to their relative market shares.

Sources

• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 — the definition of phonorecords, which excludes sounds accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work, and the definition of performing a work publicly, which reaches a transmission received in separate places and at different times.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 106 — the exclusive rights, including the public performance right in musical works at clause (4) and the digital audio transmission right in sound recordings at clause (6).
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 114 — that the rights in a sound recording do not include a general public performance right, and that noninteractive digital transmissions are subject to statutory licensing.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 115 — the compulsory licence for phonorecords of a nondramatic musical work; the blanket licence obtained through the mechanical licensing collective; the refusal of a compulsory licence for phonorecords duplicating a sound recording fixed by another; and the three-year hold and market-share distribution of unclaimed accrued royalties at (d)(3)(J).
• US Copyright Office, The Music Modernization Act — that Title I’s blanket licensing system is for digital phonorecord deliveries: permanent downloads, limited downloads and interactive streams.
• The Mechanical Licensing Collective — what the blanket licence administers, that digital service providers send usage data and royalties monthly, and who may become a member.
• BMI — what a performance licence grants, and that the licence fee is paid out to affiliated songwriters, composers and publishers as royalties.
• SOCAN — the definition of a performing right, that members assign it to SOCAN to administer and enforce, and the Notification of Live Performance: proof of the show, within one year, paid in a quarterly distribution.
• SOCAN, reproduction rights — that SOCAN represents reproduction rights in addition to performing rights, across audio, audiovisual, digital and physical media.
• CMRRA — mechanical (reproduction) royalties for streams, downloads and webcasts and for reproduction on CD, vinyl or any physical product, on behalf of publishers and self-published songwriters.
• SoundExchange — collection and distribution of digital performance royalties from services that are required by law to pay them.
• Re:Sound — the Canadian licensing company for the performance rights of artists and record companies, and the users required to pay to perform recordings publicly.
• Copyright Act (Canada), section 19(2) — that a person performing or communicating a published sound recording is liable to pay royalties to the authorised collective society. Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.

This is a map of where money is collected, not legal advice, and not a rate card — no percentage, rate or fee appears on this page, because every one of them changes on a schedule this page would go stale against. Both countries are described as their own statutes and collectors describe them; which country’s law reaches a given recording turns on facts this page cannot see. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece.

Keeping the register

Every collector above matches money to a name and an identifier, which makes the registration list a filing problem before it is a money problem. CatalogTracker holds the identifiers in one place — releases and tracks searchable by ISRC, ISWC, UPC, GRid, ISNI and IPI, with each party’s IPI and PRO recorded beside their name, so the list you are checking against is your own rather than a store’s. It does not register you with anybody and it does not collect. In development for iPhone.