SoundExchange Royalties Your PRO Will Never Pay

If a record you sang on, played on, or own the master of got spun on SiriusXM last year, and the only place you ever registered was a performing rights organization, you are owed money nobody has sent you. SoundExchange royalties are the performance royalties on the recording, and they travel on a different license, to different people, through a different organization than the ones that pay you for writing the song. ASCAP will not forward them. Neither will BMI, and neither will we. The money sits in an account waiting for a registration that, for most independent artists, never happens.

Note the condition in that first sentence, because it is the whole distinction: this money follows the performance and the master, not the songwriting. If you wrote a song and had nothing to do with the recording of it, SoundExchange owes you nothing and your PRO is the right address. Most independent artists are on both sides of that line at once, which is exactly why the second half gets missed.

This is the royalty stream with the widest gap between how easy it is to claim and how often it goes unclaimed. Registration is free and takes an afternoon.

Two performances, two checks

Every released track is two copyrights stacked on each other, which our piece on the P line and the C line covers in more detail. The composition is the melody and the lyrics. The sound recording is one fixed performance of that composition.

Both can be publicly performed, and both generate performance royalties. They just do not go to the same place:

One Pandora spin of one track can trigger both columns at once, under two separate licenses. A writer who is also the performer is owed from both and has to be registered in both places. What a performance royalty is walks through the left column; this piece is about the right one.

What the law actually grants, and what it withholds

The reason this is confusing is that Congress never gave sound recordings a full performance right. Section 114(a) says the recording owner's exclusive rights "do not include any right of performance under section 106(4)" — that is the general public performance right every musical work has had for a century.

What recordings got instead, in the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995, is a narrow right covering performance "by means of a digital audio transmission." That one clause is the entire basis for SoundExchange's existence, and its limits explain every gap below.

The Congressional Research Service puts the consequence plainly in its report on radio performance rights: broadcast radio stations "pay copyright owners of musical works (e.g., music publishers and songwriters) for the right to publicly perform those works, but they are not required to pay copyright owners of sound recordings (e.g., record labels and performers)."

Read that twice if you have ever had a record on the radio. The station paid the writer. It paid the singer nothing.

The 45/50/5 split

When a non-interactive service pays into the pool, the allocation is not negotiated. It is fixed by statute, and SoundExchange states it directly: 45 percent goes to the featured artists on the recording, 5 percent to a fund for non-featured artists, and the remaining 50 percent to the owner of the sound recording copyright.

Three things about that structure are worth knowing before you register.

The 45 percent is paid directly to the featured artist. Not through the label, not into a recoupable account, not net of anything. If you are signed and unrecouped, this is one of the few royalty lines that still reaches you, and it is why a legacy artist with no record deal left can still see SoundExchange money arrive long after the label stopped writing.

The 50 percent follows the master, not the artist. If you self-released, you own the master and you are owed both halves. If you licensed the recording to a label, the label claims that side. If a producer owns a piece of the master, the paperwork has to say so.

The 5 percent is for the players. Session musicians and backing vocalists who performed on the record but are not the credited artist claim from that fund. If you hired a string section, those people have their own claim, and it does not come out of your share.

What it covers, and what it does not

Non-interactive means the listener cannot choose the next track. That one test decides almost everything.

Covered: SiriusXM satellite radio, Pandora's radio mode, internet webcasters and simulcasters, and the music channels bundled with cable and satellite TV.

Not covered, because the service is interactive: Spotify on demand, Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, YouTube Music. Interactive services sit outside the statutory license, so they negotiate directly with master owners and pay through the distribution chain. That money lands on your distributor statement, and our distributor versus publisher explainer covers which statement shows what.

Not covered, because the law does not reach it: over-the-air AM and FM radio, including the digital HD simulcast of a broadcast signal. Also live performance, which pays the writer through a PRO and the performer through nothing at all.

Not covered, because it is a different right entirely: mechanical royalties on the composition, which run through the MLC in the US, and sync fees.

The hole in the middle of US radio, and why we think it is indefensible

Here is the opinion, and we will own it: the terrestrial radio exemption is the single least defensible thing in US music copyright, and it has survived purely because broadcasters out-lobbied performers for fifty years.

The argument for it is promotional value — radio play sells records, so the exposure is the payment. That was a thin argument when records were the business. It is close to absurd now that radio promotes a streaming catalog whose per-play economics the station has no stake in. The US pays the writer and tells the singer to be grateful for the exposure. Congress keeps being asked to change it: the same CRS report describes the American Music Fairness Act, which "would require broadcast radio stations to pay copyright royalties to performing artists, record labels, and other sound-recording copyright owners for the right to transmit music over the air." It has not passed.

This matters practically, not just rhetorically: it means the SoundExchange pool is structurally small compared with what a performance right should generate, and it means the money that is there is worth claiming precisely because there is so much less of it than there should be.

The number that should change how you think about this

SoundExchange has distributed more than $13 billion since it started in 2003. The recent trend is the part worth sitting with. Its March 2026 announcement reported unaudited 2025 full-year distributions of $991.5 million — 5.9 percent lower than 2024.

A royalty pool shrinking by six percent in a year when on-demand streaming grew is not a rounding error. It is what happens when listening migrates from the radio-shaped services inside the statutory license to the on-demand services outside it. Satellite and webcast listening is not where the growth is.

The strategic read: treat SoundExchange as a recovery job on what you have already released, not a growth line to build a plan around. Register, claim the back catalog, collect what is sitting there, and do not expect it to compound. SoundExchange says it administers for more than 800,000 music creators, and the claiming work is front-loaded by design.

What we can do here, and what we cannot

We sell publishing administration, so the honest answer is the unprofitable one: this is not ours to collect.

Publishing administration covers the composition. We register your songs, chase the mechanical and performance income on them, and take a commission on what we recover. SoundExchange money belongs to the recording, which means it falls outside that scope entirely. We do not collect it, we do not commission it, and we would not know how to bill you for it if we wanted to. Our pricing is commission-only on money we actually recover, so a royalty we never touch is a royalty we never charge for.

That makes this worth saying clearly, because the sales pitch in this industry blurs it constantly: signing a publishing deal does not cover your SoundExchange side. Two copyrights, two systems, two registrations. Anyone telling you one signature handles both is either confused about the difference or counting on you being confused.

The one place the two do meet is bundling. If you bought CD Baby's CDB Boost with a release, read what it actually collects: it registers you with SoundExchange and claims the label share, which is the 50 percent that follows the master. The featured-artist 45 percent still depends on your own SoundExchange registration as an artist. A distributor add-on claiming the owner side is not the same as being registered yourself.

Before you close this tab

1. Register as both an artist and a rights owner if you self-release. SoundExchange's registration is free, and the two roles claim different halves of the same payment.
2. Claim your back catalog, not just new releases, and do it on a clock. SoundExchange's own FAQ says that after three years royalties expire and it is authorized by regulation to release the unclaimed money. Three years is the window on anything already sitting there.
3. Get your ISRCs straight. Matching runs on recording identifiers, and a release delivered with missing or duplicated ISRCs is a release that will not match.
4. Sort out master ownership on paper before you claim. If a producer or a co-artist owns part of the recording, competing claims freeze the payment rather than splitting it.
5. Credit your session players accurately. The 5 percent fund is theirs to claim, it costs you nothing, and the credits are how they find it.
6. Keep doing the composition side separately. Your PRO registration and your MLC filings are unaffected by any of this, and they are still where the writing income lives.

If you are working out where your uncollected money actually is, unclaimed music royalties maps the composition side and collecting international royalties covers the foreign equivalents of both. The songwriters we administer have 17,000+ songs between them, and the SoundExchange question comes up for nearly every one who also performs. The answer has never once been that their publishing administrator would handle it.