What Is the Underlying Composition?

The underlying composition is the song itself: melody, harmony, structure, and lyrics if it has them. It is a separate piece of property from the recording you streamed, owned separately and paid separately. Every recorded song contains one. Plenty of independent songwriters learn the term only at the moment they discover nobody has been collecting for theirs.

The US Copyright Office states the split in a single sentence: "Copyright in a sound recording is not the same as, or a substitute for, copyright in the underlying musical composition." Two works. Two owners, potentially. Two sets of royalties, out of one three-minute file.

The two copyrights inside one song

The Copyright Office's guidance on musical compositions and sound recordings defines both sides plainly.

A musical composition "consists of music, including any accompanying words," and its author "is generally the composer and the lyricist, if any." A sound recording "results from the fixation of a series of musical, spoken, or other sounds," and its author is "the performer(s) whose performance is fixed, or the record producer who processes the sounds and fixes them in the final recording, or both."

Read that twice if you write and record your own material. You are then two different authors of two different works that happen to share a release date, and the world will treat those two works completely differently.

That last row is where independent songwriters lose money, and it is worth sitting with. Uploading a track enrolls the recording in the system that pays recordings. Nothing in that process enrolls the composition in the system that pays compositions. The two halves of your song leave the studio on very different footing.

"Underlying" is the wrong word, and the word does damage

Here is an opinion we will defend. The composition is not underneath anything.

It comes into existence first. It outlives every recording made of it. A cover, a sample clearance, a film placement, a piano version fifteen years later: all of those are negotiated against the composition, and the original master has nothing to do with any of them. The song is the durable asset. The recording is one reading of it.

The vocabulary is inherited from the record business, where the song genuinely was the thing underneath the product being shipped. That framing survived into software. It is why composition data on a distribution form is a secondary field, sometimes optional, sometimes a single free-text box for writers on a song with four of them. It is why an artist can complete an entire release with the composition side left blank and get no warning at all.

Language sets expectations. Call something underlying for fifty years and people will treat it as an afterthought, right up until they read a royalty statement that is missing half of what the song earned.

The composition has its own money

Compositions earn through two main channels in the US, neither connected to your distributor.

Mechanical royalties are owed for reproducing the composition, which includes every interactive stream, and the rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Board rather than negotiated. Under the Phonorecords IV schedule now in force, the CRB announced that "the headline royalty rate for most other digital phonorecords, including interactive streams, will be set at 15.1 to 15.35 percent of revenue, over the five-year term." That headline rate is the share of a US streaming service's revenue allocated to the songs rather than the recordings. What the recordings get is negotiated privately between services and rightsholders and is not published anywhere, which makes the composition side the only half of your song with a public price.

Performance royalties are owed when the composition is performed publicly: radio, television, venues, and streaming. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR collect those, and they pay against registered works.

Both channels share one requirement. They pay a registration, not a recording. A song with ten million streams and no composition registration generates mechanical royalties that are collected from the service, held, and eventually distributed to somebody else. We covered that destination in what happens to unclaimed royalties, and the mechanism is worth knowing before it applies to you rather than after.

How to check whether anyone is collecting for yours

This takes about five minutes and costs nothing, so there is no reason to guess.

The MLC's Public Work Search is open to the public. In The MLC's own description of its tools, the search "allows anyone — songwriters, publishers, or the general public — to view musical work ownership information on more than 55 million songs in The MLC's database, free of charge."

Search one of your song titles and check three things:

1. Does the work appear at all? If it does not, US streaming mechanicals for that song are reaching nobody.
2. Is every writer listed, under their legal name? Stage names do not match. A missing co-writer is the most common reason a work sits partly unpaid.
3. Do the shares total 100%? Splits that fall short leave the remainder unallocated, and your correctly filed portion can be held alongside it.

Then check the performance side separately at your PRO's public repertory, because a clean MLC record tells you nothing about ASCAP or BMI. The two systems do not talk to each other. Our guide to registering a song walks through the order to do this in.

One caution on interpreting what you find: a publisher name you do not recognize on your own work is not automatically a problem, since administrators register under their own entity. A publisher name you have never had any relationship with is a different matter, and worth resolving before it hardens into a conflict.

Why the gap exists in the first place

The honest answer is that nobody in the upload path is responsible for the composition.

A distributor's job ends at delivering recordings to stores, and it does that job well. We set out the boundary in distributor versus publisher, and the short version is that the fields on a distribution form, including the C line, do not reach the MLC or any PRO. They were never wired to.

The volume is what makes this hard to fix by hand later. Across our 8 signed artists, our ASCAP automation processes roughly 1,100 works per artist. That is the size of the filing job sitting between a real catalog and its performance royalties, and it is the reason "I will register them myself this weekend" reliably becomes "I registered the first nine." Doing it for a catalog that size, and keeping it current as societies bounce and re-request filings, is the work we charge for: 15% of performance royalties and 20% of mechanicals, taken only from money we actually recover. Our pricing page has the rest of the terms, and the glossary covers the vocabulary this post assumes.

The composition is the part of your work that lasts. It deserves better than a blank field on an upload form.