What “owning your masters” actually gets you

24 · 2026-08-22 · 12 min read · Español

Owning a master is four exclusive rights over one recording, and the standing to license that recording to anyone who wants it. It is not ownership of the song, which is a separate copyright with its own owners. It is not payment, because every stream of money those rights entitle you to arrives at a name in a register rather than at an owner in a contract. And it is not a veto over everything a stranger might do with your record — United States law licenses one whole category of use over your head, at a price you do not set.

• A sound recording’s owner holds four of the six exclusive rights in US copyright: reproduction, derivative works, distribution, and public performance by digital audio transmission.
• Sync, advertising, sampling and interactive streaming all need the master owner’s permission.
• Non-interactive services — Pandora, SiriusXM, webcasters — do not need it: US law licenses them by statute, at rates set in a proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Judges.
• A separate recording that imitates yours, made from its own independent fixation, does not infringe the master.
• US AM/FM radio pays the recording’s owner nothing. Canada pays performers and makers for the same play.

What rights does owning a master actually give you?

Four exclusive rights in one recording: reproduction, derivative works, distribution, and public performance by digital audio transmission.

That is the whole estate. Section 106 lists six exclusive rights that a copyright owner holds, and a sound recording gets four of them. The two it does not get are the two that would have made the last century of this business look completely different.

Section 114 says it in one sentence, and it is the most consequential sentence in this piece:

The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording are limited to the rights specified by clauses (1), (2), (3) and (6) of section 106, and do not include any right of performance under section 106(4).

Read the bottom row again. A stream is two performances at once — a public performance of the song under clause (4), and a digital audio transmission of the recording under clause (6). Two rights, two owners, two doors, one play. Which is why the money for a single stream shows up in more than one place and never all in yours.

Everything below assumes those rights are actually yours. Whether they are is a different question with a harder answer — the producer who recorded you may be a co-author of the master, and a work-for-hire clause is usually not what fixes it. Settle that first. This piece is about what you are holding once you have.

What can you say no to?

Any use that copies, alters, distributes or interactively streams the recording needs the master owner’s permission — a film, an ad, a sample.

This is the part of ownership that behaves the way people expect. Somebody wants your record in their trailer, their show, their game, their playlist. They cannot have it without you. That is a real veto and it is worth real money, and it is also worth less than it sounds, for one reason.

Your yes is half a yes. The Copyright Office puts it plainly: “A sound recording and the music, lyrics, words, or other content included in the recording are separate copyright-protected works,” and the two are “commonly owned and licensed separately.” A film using your record needs a licence for the recording — the master use licence, which is yours to grant — and a synchronization licence for the song, which is not, unless you wrote it and never signed the publishing away. A supervisor who gets your yes and cannot get the other one walks away and uses something else. That other half is the publishing, and it is a copyright of its own.

Sampling lands on the same side of the line. A sample copies the fixation — the actual sounds on your record — so it needs the owner of that fixation, which is you. What it also needs from the song’s owners is a separate conversation with separate people.

Interactive streaming is the quiet one, because it does not feel like licensing. Spotify and Apple Music carry your record because somebody with the right to license it did, and in a self-release that somebody is you, acting through a distributor. The delivery is the licence. Which is why you can end it.

What can you not say no to?

In the United States, non-interactive services. Pandora, SiriusXM and webcasters license sound recordings by statute, at rates set in a proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Judges.

Nobody tells you this part. Under section 114, a subscription digital audio transmission that is not exempt, an eligible nonsubscription transmission, and a preexisting satellite digital audio radio service “shall be subject to statutory licensing.” Statutory means the law grants the licence. You are not asked, you cannot refuse, and you do not negotiate — the rates come out of a proceeding under chapter 8 of the Copyright Act — “Proceedings by Copyright Royalty Judges” — which “shall determine reasonable rates and terms of royalty payments for transmissions subject to statutory licensing.”

The line between the service that has to ask you and the service that does not is a single condition: the statutory licence is only available where the transmission “is not part of an interactive service.” Not size. Not revenue. Not how famous the platform is. Whether the listener picked the track.

So the veto you hold is shaped like a keyhole. Spotify is on your side of it and Pandora is on the other, and the same recording, on the same afternoon, is licensed two entirely different ways.

Can someone copy your record without copying your recording?

Yes. A separate recording that imitates yours, made from an independent fixation of other sounds, does not infringe the sound recording copyright.

The statute is blunt about it:

The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 do not extend to the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording.

Even though. The statute anticipates that the imitation will be deliberate, and says it anyway.

What a master copyright protects is the fixation — those particular sounds, captured that particular day. It does not protect the arrangement, the tone, the production, or the impression the record makes on a listener who is not paying attention. Hire the same players, cut it the same way, get close enough that a listener would not bet against it, and the recording copyright has nothing to say about it.

That is the seam between the two copyrights, seen from the recording side. Copy the fixation and you need the master’s owner. Rebuild it from nothing and you do not — though the song underneath is a separate copyright, with its own owners and its own answer, and that answer is where a soundalike usually runs into trouble.

Does owning the master mean you get paid when it plays?

In the United States, only on digital audio transmissions; AM/FM radio pays the song’s owners and pays the recording’s owner nothing.

The Copyright Office states the limit in its own guidance for musicians: for sound recordings “there is no public display right … and the public performance right is limited to ‘digital audio transmissions,’ for example, digital streaming.” No general performance right means no claim on the broadcast. The station plays your record, the audience hears your record, the songwriters and publishers get paid, and the people who made the record are not in the transaction at all.

Cross the border and the same play works differently. Canada’s Copyright Act, at section 19(1):

If a sound recording has been published, the performer and maker are entitled, subject to subsection 20(1), to be paid equitable remuneration for its performance in public or its communication to the public by telecommunication…

Performer and maker, both, subject to an eligibility condition in section 20(1) that turns on where the recording comes from. Re:Sound is the licensing company that collects it — “the Canadian not-for-profit music licensing company dedicated to obtaining fair compensation for artists and record companies for their performance rights” — from radio stations, satellite radio, streaming services and businesses playing recorded music in public. How that money divides between the performer’s side and the maker’s side is set out in the credits piece, in both countries, with the percentages.

You cannot fix the statute. What you can do is make damn sure that every place which does pay knows your name.

Why doesn’t owning it pay you by itself?

Every one of these payments goes to a name in a register or a distributor account, not to an owner named in a contract.

Master-side money has two addresses. SoundExchange is the first, and it says the condition out loud: “Recording artists and sound recording owners must be registered with SoundExchange in order to receive digital performance royalties.” Must be registered. Not must own — the ownership is assumed, and it buys you an entitlement, not a payment. What the digital services actually pay for is described on the same organisation’s royalties page: “service providers such as Pandora, SiriusXM, and webcasters are required by law to pay for streaming musical content.”

The second address is whoever delivered your music. Spotify defines recording royalties as “the money owed to rightsholders for recordings streamed on Spotify, which is paid to artists through the licensor that delivered the music, typically their record label or distributor.” The licensor. Not the owner, not the author, not the person with the strongest moral claim to it — the account that did the delivery.

So a master you own outright, on a release you paid for, pays exactly nothing until a registration and an account point at you. Both are forms. Both are free or nearly. Neither happens on its own.

And the money that does arrive comes in short of the number in your head for reasons that are mostly not theft — the statement piece works through all six, including the composition-side registers this piece has deliberately left alone, and producer points are the one deduction that was agreed rather than routed.

What do you check to know your masters are actually working?

Four checks per release: the P-line, the SoundExchange registration, the account the distributor pays, and who answers a licensing request.

Ten minutes each, and every one of them is the practical form of a section above.

1. The P-line on the delivered release. It is the ownership claim you have already published to every store. Check it names who you believe owns the recording, spelled the way you spell it everywhere else.
2. The SoundExchange registration, as the sound recording owner. Being the featured artist is a different registration from being the rights owner, and one is not the other.
3. The account the distributor pays. Whoever the licensor is, is who gets paid. If that account is an old collaborator, an old band name, or an email nobody reads, the licence is doing its job and the money is not reaching you.
4. Who answers a licensing request. A supervisor with a deadline sends one email. If it goes to a dead address, the answer is no by default, and you never learn it was asked.

Do those four on your best-earning release today. Then do them on everything, in the order failures propagate, which is what the catalogue audit is for. Ownership is the thing nobody can take from you. Everything else on this page is the thing you have to go and collect.

FAQ

Does owning your master mean you own the song?

No. The recording and the musical work are two separate copyrights, owned and licensed separately. Owning every master on a record says nothing about who owns the songs on it.

Does US radio pay the owner of the recording?

No. A sound recording has no general public performance right under US law, so an AM/FM broadcast pays the songwriters and publishers and pays the recording’s owner nothing. Digital audio transmissions are the exception, and SoundExchange collects them.

Can you take your music off Spotify if you own the master?

Yes. An interactive service carries a recording because its owner licensed it, in practice through a distributor, so ending that delivery ends the availability. A statutory licence works the other way and does not ask.

Can someone legally re-record your track to sound exactly like it?

As far as the sound recording copyright goes, yes. Section 114(b) puts an independently fixed imitation outside the owner’s exclusive rights. Whether the song’s owners have to agree is a separate copyright’s question.

Sources

• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 106 — the six exclusive rights, including clause (4)’s public performance right for musical works and clause (6)’s digital audio transmission right for sound recordings.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 114 — (a) limits a sound recording to four of the six rights; (b) excludes an independently fixed imitation; (d)(2) subjects non-interactive transmissions to statutory licensing and (d)(2)(A)(i) withholds it from interactive services; (f)(1)(A) sends the rates to a chapter 8 proceeding.
• US Copyright Act, chapter 8 — “Proceedings by Copyright Royalty Judges,” which is the proceeding § 114(f)(1)(A) sends the statutory licence’s rates to, and the reason this piece names the judges rather than a body the statute does not.
• US Copyright Office, What Musicians Should Know about Copyright — that the recording and the content recorded are separate works, commonly owned and licensed separately, and that a sound recording’s public performance right is limited to digital audio transmissions. The Office’s PDF circulars on this subject would not extract on the machine this piece was written on; this HTML page states both propositions and was read end to end.
• SoundExchange, For Artists, Labels & Producers — that recording artists and sound recording owners must be registered in order to receive digital performance royalties.
• SoundExchange, Digital Performance Royalties — which services owe these royalties, and that they are paid by the services to SoundExchange rather than to the rights owner directly.
• Spotify, Royalties — that recording royalties are paid to artists through the licensor that delivered the music, typically a label or distributor.
• Copyright Act (Canada), section 19(1) — the performer’s and maker’s entitlement to equitable remuneration for a published sound recording performed in public or communicated to the public, subject to section 20(1). Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.
• Re:Sound — what the Canadian licensing company is and which users it licenses: radio, satellite radio, streaming services, and businesses playing recorded music in public.

This is not legal advice. Everything above is US and Canadian law stated generally, and what your own rights are worth depends on facts this page cannot see: what you signed, where you are, and who else already holds paper. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. Before you license a master or sign one away, have a music lawyer in the right territory read it.

Keeping the register

The reason this piece keeps saying “two copyrights” is that a track is two allocations, and CatalogTracker keeps them the way they actually exist: master splits and publishing splits per track, separately, each summing to its own 100, beside the P-line that is the ownership claim your release already published. It records what you own and what you signed. It registers nothing with anybody — the forms in the section above are still yours to file. In development for iPhone.