Types of Music Royalties: A Songwriter's Map

There is one song, two copyrights, and about seven kinds of money. Nearly every explanation of the types of music royalties lists the kinds of money and stops there, which is why a songwriter can finish reading one and still hire the wrong company. The useful question is not how many royalty types exist. It is which of the two copyrights earns each one, because that single fact decides who is allowed to collect it on your behalf.

The short version: a recorded song contains two separate copyrights. The composition, meaning the melody and lyric you wrote, earns mechanical royalties, performance royalties, sync fees and print royalties. The sound recording, meaning the specific master someone paid to make, earns streaming and download royalties, master sync fees, and US digital radio royalties for the recording. A publisher or publishing administrator works the first list. A distributor or label works the second. Nobody works both lists for you under one deal, and any list of "the four types of music royalties" that does not draw this line is leaving out the only part that affects your decisions.

Here is the whole map on one screen.

If you wrote a song and someone else owns the master, the bottom three rows are not yours. If you wrote it and also funded the recording, you own both sides and have to collect each one separately, from different organizations, on different schedules.

The composition side, in the order it pays

Mechanical royalties

A mechanical royalty is owed when a copy of your composition is made. The name is a hundred years old, from piano rolls, and it has survived into a world where the copy is a stream.

This is the one royalty type you can look up in a regulation, because the US sets it by statute. Under 37 CFR 385.11, the 2026 rate for a physical phonorecord or permanent download is 13.1 cents per work, or 2.52 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is larger. The Copyright Royalty Judges adjust it every year for inflation, measured against the Consumer Price Index published the previous November.

Streaming works nothing like that, and the difference is worth understanding properly because it is where most of the money is. 37 CFR 385.21 sets no per-play rate at all. It sets a four-step calculation:

1. Take the greater of a headline percentage of the service's revenue, 15.3% in 2026 and 15.35% in 2027, or a figure derived from what the service pays for sound recordings.
2. Subtract the performance royalties the service has already paid for musical works.
3. Compare the result against a per-subscriber floor and take the higher.
4. Divide what is left by the total number of plays, then multiply by your song's plays.

Step 2 is the step nobody explains, and it reframes everything. The 15.3% is an all-in publishing figure. The performance money the service pays your society comes out of it first, and the mechanical pool The MLC distributes is the remainder. On US streaming, mechanical and performance royalties are not two separate pots of money. They are one pot, divided twice. Anyone describing them as independent revenue streams that you can stack is describing a system that does not exist.

One quirk from step 4 worth knowing if you write long: the formula contains an overtime adjustment. A recording of 5:01 to 6:00 counts as 1.2 plays when the pool is divided, 6:01 to 7:00 counts as 1.4, and it keeps rising by 0.2 per further minute. A seven-minute song claims a larger slice of the same pool than a three-minute one. The pool does not grow.

The organization that distributes US streaming mechanicals is The MLC, and it is unusual in taking nothing: it says it keeps no portion of the royalties it collects, because its operating costs are covered by the digital services through an administrative assessment set by the Copyright Royalty Board, and that it distributes 100% of what it collects. What it will not do is anything else. Its own FAQ is blunt that it "is not involved in any other types of licenses or royalties, including public performance licenses or royalties, synchronization licenses or royalties, or record royalties." Registering at The MLC and assuming you are covered is the single most common mistake we see. Our full breakdown of mechanical royalties goes deeper on the rates.

Performance royalties

A performance royalty is owed when your composition is performed in public: broadcast on radio or television, played in a bar or a gym, performed at a venue, or streamed, since a stream carries a performance alongside its copy.

These are collected by a performing rights organization. In the US that means ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or GMR, and you can be affiliated with exactly one at a time for a given song. Abroad, a local society collects in its own territory and passes money back through reciprocal agreements, which is where royalties most often get lost.

The scale is useful context for what a single song is competing against. ASCAP's 2025 annual report puts its revenue at $1.945 billion with $1.759 billion available for distribution, and ASCAP states that about 90 cents of every dollar it collects goes out to members. Your royalty is a share of that pool rather than a price per play, so it moves quarter to quarter even when nothing about your song changes.

The structural trap on this side is that every performance royalty splits in half: a writer's share and a publisher's share. The writer's share comes to you. The publisher's share goes to whichever publisher is registered on the work, and if none is registered, that half simply is not paid. Publisher share vs writer share covers the arithmetic, and the ASCAP guide covers the registration mechanics.

Synchronization fees

Sync is a composition being timed to picture: a scene, a trailer, a commercial, a game. It has no statutory rate and no compulsory license, which makes it the one royalty type with no ceiling and no floor. A placement in a national campaign and a placement in a student film are the same legal transaction at wildly different prices.

Two licenses are needed for one scene, and this is where the two-copyright structure becomes concrete. The production needs a sync license from the composition owner and a master use license from the recording owner. Both are needed, so if you wrote the song and someone else owns the master, either of you can refuse and the placement dies. You are also paid on only one of the two. Our sync licensing guide covers how the quotes get built.

Sync fees are also why "my publisher pays me nothing, I should leave" is sometimes wrong. Collecting mechanical and performance money is administration, and most of it is process work that runs the same way every time. Getting a song in front of a music supervisor is not, and it is the one function a traditional publisher genuinely performs that an administrator mostly does not. Do I need a music publisher is the honest version of that decision.

Print royalties

Sheet music, folios, choral and band arrangements, and the licensed lyric and tab sites. Negotiated with the print publisher, usually as a royalty on retail price or a share of licensing income.

For most writers of recorded popular music this line is a rounding error, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For writers in musical theatre, worship, educational and choral music it can be a serious share of income, and it is the royalty type most likely to be missing from a general administration deal entirely. Read what your agreement actually covers before you assume print is in it.

The recording side, and why no administrator can collect it for you

Three of the royalty types that appear on the popular "six types" lists belong to the master, not the song.

Recording royalties from streams, downloads and sales are paid to whoever owns the master, which for an independent release is usually you, reaching you through your distributor. Master sync fees are paid to the same owner. US digital radio royalties for the recording, earned when a master is played on non-interactive digital and satellite radio, are collected by a separate recording-side collective, with a portion paid directly to performers.

We collect none of these. Davincii is a publishing administrator: we work the composition side, and that is the whole of what we do. We say this plainly because the confusion is profitable for companies who leave it vague, and because a songwriter who believes one deal covers everything is a songwriter who will not go and set up the thing that actually collects the rest. What publishing administration covers draws the boundary, and distributor vs publisher explains why you need one of each.

Why the standard list is organized wrong

Here is the opinion, and it is held firmly.

Search the types of music royalties and you will get a numbered list: mechanical, performance, sync, print, sometimes digital performance, sometimes micro-sync. The lists are mostly accurate. They are also organized by the name of the money, which is the least useful possible axis, and the result is that a songwriter finishes one with the impression that royalties are a set of taps to be opened and that somewhere there is a company that opens all of them.

There is not. Sorted by copyright, the list stops reading as a menu and starts reading as a map of who to hire: one company for the composition, one route for the recording, and a specific gap in the middle where sync lives and where nobody acts for you unless you ask them to. Every expensive mistake we see in a new songwriter's catalog traces back to the name-sorted version of this list. The writer who registered at The MLC and never affiliated with a PRO. The writer with a distributor who assumed publishing was included. The writer who never claimed the publisher's half of their own performance royalties because no list they read mentioned the half existed.

A royalty type you cannot name costs you nothing. A royalty type you have mis-filed under the wrong copyright costs you the whole of it.

What this means for your catalog

The practical version is short.

1. Register every composition twice. Once at your performing rights organization for performance, once at The MLC for US streaming mechanicals. Neither tells the other. The register your song guide is the walkthrough.
2. Make sure a publisher is named on every work, your own entity or an administrator's, or the publisher's half of each performance royalty is not paid to anybody.
3. Keep the recording side separate in your head. Distributor for the master, publishing for the song, and a direct arrangement for the recording-side digital radio money if you own masters.
4. Expect several statements. Four or five arriving on different schedules is a working catalog, not a problem. Our guide to reading royalty statements covers what each one is telling you.

The songwriters we administer have 21,000+ songs between them, and each song needs its own filing in each system that could pay it. That is the real shape of the work behind these seven words, and it is why the registration half of this gets abandoned around song nine. Doing it, and keeping it current as societies bounce and re-request filings, is what we charge for: 15% of performance royalties and 20% of mechanicals, taken only from money we actually recover. The pricing page has the rest of the terms, and the glossary covers any vocabulary this post assumed.

Get started when the filing backlog is the thing standing between your catalog and its money. If it is sync you want, the honest answer is that you want a publisher, and we will tell you so.