Part II — Get paid

The money already exists

Name the separate royalties one play can trigger, say which body collects each, and work out which of them you are currently registered to receive.

One play is not one payment

Start with the thing that sounds wrong the first time you hear it. When someone streams your song, more than one royalty can be generated, and they are collected by more than one organisation. They do not all arrive in the same place, and they do not all arrive.

Most independent artists have exactly one receiving relationship: a distributor. The distributor put the record on the streaming services, the distributor sends a statement, and the number on that statement is the number the artist quotes when they say streaming pays nothing. That number is real. It is also one payout out of several, and the others are not withheld — they are simply addressed to accounts nobody opened.

That is Part II's whole argument. Some of this money has already been generated by work you already released, and the question is whether the systems routing it know where you are.

Two assets, one song

Before the accounts make sense, the split underneath them has to.

Every recorded song is two separate pieces of property. The composition — the song itself, the melody and the words, the thing a cover version is a version of. And the recording — the performance captured on a specific day, the master. One composition can carry many recordings: your version, a cover, a remix, an alternate-language cut, a sped-up edit (CSJHqW8DiKc).

Two assets means two owners, and they are often not the same person. A writer who never entered the booth owns a share of the composition. A label that funded the session may own the recording. That is not a corner case; it is the normal shape of a record with more than one person on it.

Here is why it belongs in a chapter about money rather than one about paperwork: the composition and the recording are collected by different bodies. They are not two lines on one statement. They are two pipes into two different sets of accounts, and an artist who owns both and is registered for one is collecting half of their own record.

An artist holding both the song and the recording holds two claims over the same stream. That is a good position, and the one that loses most from being unregistered, because there is more to fail to collect.

What one series says the streams are

The most specific version of this claim in our source material is a video arguing that a single stream triggers five separate royalties and that a distributor account is registered to receive one of them (VNaeo_SF3LI). As the speaker names them: the master royalty on the stream, a mechanical royalty, a performance royalty, a lyric royalty, and a newer music-video royalty. He maps each to a body — the distributor for the master, a PRO for performance, the MLC for mechanicals, Harry Fox for video, and a lyrics service he pronounces "Music Match" for lyrics.

Treat that mapping as leads, not as a checklist. Our note on the video flags it: he offers no documentation, and the Harry Fox assignment in particular does not match how that organisation is usually described. Check each one at the organisation's own site before opening an account on the strength of a video — including this book's summary of one.

A second video in the same series gives a longer, differently-shaped list (rDSDsy3_Pf8) — composition side: a PRO, the MLC, Harry Fox (HFA), Music Reports (MRI); recording side: SoundExchange, for non-interactive digital performance, meaning satellite and internet radio rather than on-demand streaming; plus filing the recordings and the musical works with the US Copyright Office. The two lists overlap and do not match. That is the honest state of the source.

What survives both versions is worth carrying:

• The distributor is one account, not the account. It handles the recording side of on-demand

streaming and nothing else.

• Performance and mechanical are the two composition-side pipelines carrying most of the money

back to a writer (CSJHqW8DiKc). If you learn two, learn those.

• The recording side has a body most artists have never signed up with — SoundExchange, for

the digital-radio use of the master.

• Which bodies apply depends on where you are. More below.

Why this chapter quotes no rates

You will have noticed there are no numbers here. That is deliberate, and the reason tells you how much of what you read on this subject to believe.

The series these chapters are distilled from gives per-stream figures in several videos, and those figures disagree with each other by an order of magnitude. In one of them the speaker says "cents" while stating numbers shaped like dollars, which is a thousandfold difference in the thing being compared.

So: the source does not give a reliable figure, and the figures it does give elsewhere contradict each other. We are not going to supply a correct-sounding one to fill the gap. No argument here needs a rate to work. The same applies to splits, fees, registration costs and payout timings. Where this book gives none, it is because the source has none — and the number already in your head is probably from a video like these.

The black box, and why waiting does not work

Money that is generated and never claimed does not sit in an account with your name on it waiting for you to notice.

Two videos raise this and describe the same mechanism: unclaimed royalties are eventually redistributed. One says the pool is shared out by market share (mm9iWoUR7eE); the other says it goes to the biggest rightsholders (VNaeo_SF3LI). Neither sources the claim, so treat the detail as the speakers' — but both versions agree on the structural point, and that is the part that changes behaviour.

Failing to register is not a null action. It is not "I will get to it and collect later." If these speakers are right, it is a transfer: your unclaimed share funds someone whose paperwork was in order. That is the difference between a delay and a loss, and it is why Part II sits before the marketing chapters. A campaign you skip is one you can run next month. Collection you skip is money that has already gone.

The same logic runs forward: register before the record does anything. If a release takes off there is no calm week in which to do tedious registration work, and the money arriving that week arrives while nobody is registered to receive it (rDSDsy3_Pf8). A campaign checklist in the same series puts registered metadata and open receiving accounts before the first promotional post, because money with nowhere to land sits in limbo and then goes into the black box (hiETAHqNVUw).

"Streaming pays pennies" measures one payout

Now the sentence this chapter exists to take apart.

Streaming does pay very little per play. Nothing here disputes that. What the complaint usually does is take one number, from one statement, from one account, and treat it as the total return on a record. It is the master royalty on on-demand streams, and it is the only one an artist with a distributor and nothing else is set up to see.

Two things follow. A per-stream number that names no platform is meaningless — rates differ by service, so "streaming pays X" without a which has told you almost nothing. And more usefully: the complaint is a diagnosis of your account setup, not of the industry. If several of the possible streams are not reaching you, the fix is administrative and finishable. It is not a better contract, a bigger audience or a different distributor.

Be honest about the ceiling, though. Registration makes you eligible; it does not make you profitable (rDSDsy3_Pf8). Collecting everything a small catalogue generates still leaves you with what a small catalogue generates. Part II is the floor under a career; Parts III to VI are the career.

This is US-specific, and that matters

The organisations named here — the MLC, Harry Fox, Music Reports, SoundExchange, the US Copyright Office — are United States institutions, as are ASCAP and BMI, the PROs this material names most often.

The shape of the problem transfers almost everywhere: a composition side, a recording side, a body collecting performance income, usually something handling mechanicals. The instruments do not. Even the source concedes it — one speaker says outright that mechanical agencies differ by country and "everybody ain't same." Outside the US, use this chapter to learn what to ask about, then find your own territory's equivalents. Do not open a US account because a video told you to.

Get someone qualified

Publishing administration is a job, and there are people who do it. Administration and collection arrangements exist precisely because registering a catalogue correctly across several bodies in several territories is specialist, repetitive work that is easy to get subtly wrong.

Nothing in this book is legal, tax or financial advice, and this is the chapter where that matters most. Use it to work out which questions to ask, then ask them of a music lawyer, a publishing administrator or an accountant who has done this before. One conversation with someone qualified beats any amount of reading, including this.

What to do this week

1. Write down every account that could pay you, and mark which ones you actually hold. Start

with your distributor. Then a PRO, a mechanical body, and SoundExchange or your territory's equivalent. The list of gaps is the chapter's real output.

1. **For your three best-known songs, write down who owns the composition and who owns the

recording.** Names and shares, as best you know them. If you cannot answer for a song, that is the song to deal with first — and the next chapter is about exactly that.

1. Check one claim in this chapter at the source. Pick one body named here, open its own site,

and find out what it actually collects. You are checking us, and you should.

Next: Registering so it can reach you — the mechanics of becoming payable, and what to do when a co-writer will not answer.