What Is a Mechanical Royalty? A Plain-English Breakdown

If you wrote a song and someone streams it, presses it to vinyl, sells it on iTunes, or burns it to a CD, you're owed a mechanical royalty. The name is a holdover from the early 1900s, when "mechanical reproduction" meant making a copy of a song on a piano roll. The term stuck. The money is real and surprisingly large for working songwriters — but it's also the royalty most likely to go uncollected.

Short answer: a mechanical royalty is the payment a songwriter (and their publisher) receives whenever the composition is reproduced — physically or digitally. It's separate from performance royalties, separate from sync royalties, and separate from anything the recording artist earns on the master side. In the US, the MLC collects digital mechanicals from streaming services automatically, but only if your songs are registered correctly.

The long version below explains the difference between the composition and the recording, why one stream creates two different royalties, and where mechanicals tend to leak.

The composition vs the recording — start here

Every song you hear has two copyrights, owned (often) by different people.

• The composition is the song itself — the melody, lyrics, chord progression. The author is the songwriter. The owner of the composition copyright is usually the songwriter and the publisher.
• The recording (also called the master) is the specific audio capture of someone performing that composition. The author is the recording artist and producer. The owner of the master copyright is usually the artist and/or their label.

When Beyoncé covers a Dolly Parton song, two completely separate copyrights are involved. Dolly wrote the composition. Beyoncé's team owns the recording. Both get paid, but through different pipelines.

A mechanical royalty pays the composition side. Specifically, it pays for the act of reproducing the composition — the same idea whether it's pressed on vinyl in 1985 or streamed on Spotify in 2026. The act of making a copy of the song triggers the royalty.

This is also the reason a single stream produces two separate royalty streams: one to the master owner (the recording royalty), and one to the songwriter and publisher (the mechanical royalty, plus a performance royalty — more on that below).

What counts as a "mechanical reproduction" today

The Copyright Act considers all of the following mechanical reproductions of a composition:

• Streaming on an interactive service (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Tidal — anywhere users pick what plays)
• Permanent downloads (iTunes purchases, Bandcamp downloads)
• Physical formats (CDs, vinyl records, cassettes)
• Ringtones (yes, still a thing in the statute)
• Some interactive uses inside video platforms

Each of these triggers a mechanical royalty owed to the songwriter and publisher.

What is not a mechanical:

• Terrestrial radio, restaurants, gyms, live venues — these are public performances, paid as performance royalties through your PRO (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). See our ASCAP and BMI breakdowns.
• TV shows, films, ads, and games — these are sync licenses, negotiated up front by a sync agent or publisher.
• Non-interactive digital radio (Pandora's radio mode, SiriusXM) — these pay a digital performance royalty on the master side, collected by SoundExchange.

The line between mechanical and performance is honestly fuzzy in the streaming era. Streaming legally counts as both — every Spotify play triggers a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty on the publishing side. The mechanical is paid by the MLC. The performance is paid by your PRO. Same stream, two checks, different organizations.

The rate, in 2026

Mechanical royalty rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board (the CRB) every five years. The current rate structure runs through 2027.

For physical and download formats, the rate is the statutory rate — currently $0.124 per copy (12.4 cents) for songs five minutes or shorter, per the current rates published by the US Copyright Office. Songs longer than five minutes get a per-minute rate.

For streaming, the math is much messier. The CRB sets streaming mechanicals as a percentage of streaming service revenue, blended with a per-stream floor and a per-subscriber minimum. The headline number for 2026 is 15.35 percent of revenue going to publishing, of which roughly half is the mechanical share. In real-world per-stream terms, that lands at roughly:

• $0.0004 to $0.0006 per US premium stream for the mechanical alone (separate from the performance royalty)

So a song with one million US premium Spotify streams generates roughly $400 to $600 in mechanical royalties on the publishing side — on top of whatever the recording side earns. The full per-service picture is in how much Spotify pays per stream. You can request a royalty estimate and we'll run this math for your tracks.

Numbers move from year to year as streaming revenue grows. The 2023-2027 settlement raised mechanical rates noticeably from the previous period.

Who collects the money

This is where most indie songwriters lose track:

The MLC piece is the one that catches independent writers. Streaming is now the bulk of mechanical income for most songwriters, and the MLC will not pay you a cent if your song isn't registered with the right metadata. We covered the full mechanics of that in our MLC vs HFA piece.

For international mechanicals, you typically need a publishing administrator or a publisher that has sub-publishing relationships with each major foreign society. Without one, your foreign streaming mechanicals largely don't reach you.

Where mechanicals leak

The most common failure modes we see when an artist asks us to audit their catalog:

• No MLC registration at all. The artist registered with their PRO years ago, assumed that covered everything, and never set up an MLC account. The mechanical money is sitting in the MLC's unclaimed pool.
• MLC registration with missing ISWCs. The MLC matches on the ISWC (International Standard Musical Work Code). No ISWC, no match. Your PRO issues an ISWC when you register the song with them — but you have to actually request it.
• Writer or publisher splits don't total 100 percent. The MLC rejects partial registrations. We see writers register at 33 percent without naming the other 67 percent — that song's mechanical royalties go nowhere.
• No publisher at all. Some writers register with the MLC as 100 percent writer with zero publisher share. The MLC requires a publisher entity for the publisher share (the other 50 percent of the total mechanical). Without one, half the money is stuck.
• No foreign sub-publishing. International mechanicals are gated behind sub-publishing agreements with each foreign society. If you only registered domestically, you're missing the foreign half of the global market.

Mechanical vs performance — the one chart you need

Same Spotify play, two royalties on the publishing side:

Both flow to the same songwriter. Both require separate registration. Missing either one cuts your publishing income roughly in half.

So do you have a mechanical royalty problem?

A useful checklist:

1. Are all your songs registered with the MLC, with full writer/publisher splits totaling 100 percent on each side?
2. Do all your songs have ISWCs, issued by your PRO?
3. Is there a publisher entity collecting the publisher half — either yourself, a publishing admin, or a publisher you signed with?
4. Do you have international sub-publishing in place for foreign streaming mechanicals?
5. Have you checked the MLC's unclaimed works portal for songs that streamed before you got registered?

If you answered no to any of those, you have mechanical money sitting somewhere it shouldn't. We do this work for our roster — full model on the publishing administration page. We charge 20 percent of the mechanicals we actually recover, 15 percent on performance royalties — not a cut off the top. If we don't find anything, we don't bill anything.

The mechanical royalty has been around for over a hundred years. The pipes that move it just keep getting more confusing.