How International Royalty Collection Actually Works

Your song gets played on radio in Germany. Streamed in Brazil. Used in a shop in Japan. Money is generated in all three places — and none of those three countries has ever heard of your PRO.

This is the part of publishing that quietly loses independent songwriters the most money, because nothing about it fails loudly. There's no error message. The money simply doesn't arrive, and you have no way of knowing it existed.

Short answer: your home society collects abroad only through reciprocal agreements with foreign societies, each handoff costs time and a percentage, and the most common reason foreign money never reaches you is that your registration data was too thin for a foreign society to match.

Rule one: your PRO is domestic

ASCAP licenses the United States. PRS for Music licenses the United Kingdom. SACEM licenses France. None of them has authority to license a venue or a broadcaster in another country.

What they have instead is a web of reciprocal agreements. SACEM collects in France from everyone — French writers and foreign writers alike — then passes the foreign writers' share to their home societies. Your PRO does the same in reverse for French writers played in your territory.

So the chain for a play in France looks like this:

1. A French broadcaster pays SACEM.
2. SACEM identifies the work and the writers.
3. SACEM matches you to your home society.
4. Your home society receives the money.
5. Your home society pays you on its own distribution schedule.

Every one of those five steps is a place money can stop moving.

Rule two: most countries don't split rights the way the US does

In the US, performance and mechanical are administered by completely separate organizations — your PRO for performance, The MLC for streaming mechanicals. That split is unusual.

Most of the world bundles them:

• SACEM (France) collects public performance and mechanicals.
• GEMA (Germany) collects public performance and mechanicals.
• PRS for Music (UK) is administered alongside MCPS — you join one and get both.
• APRA AMCOS (Australia and New Zealand) is two organizations run together: APRA for performance, AMCOS for mechanical.
• Buma/Stemra (Netherlands) works the same way — Buma performance, Stemra mechanical.

This matters because a US writer thinking in US categories will assume their mechanicals abroad need a separate mechanical society. Usually they don't. Assuming the American structure is universal is how people end up chasing registrations that were never required.

Rule three: there's a third pool most writers don't qualify for

Neighboring rights pay the recording, not the composition — the master owner and the featured performers on it. SoundExchange handles this in the US; PPL is the UK equivalent; SCAPR is the umbrella body coordinating these societies internationally.

If you only wrote the song, this pool isn't yours. If you also performed on the recording, it is — and it's entirely separate from anything your PRO does. It's worth knowing which side of that line you're on before you go looking for money that was never owed to you.

Where the money actually leaks

In my experience the reciprocal network works better than its reputation. The failures are almost always upstream of it.

Your work was never registered with enough identifying data. A foreign society receiving a usage report needs to match a title and a writer to a real person. Without an ISWC, without your IPI number, against a common title, that match fails silently and the money goes to the unmatched pool.

Your splits don't total 100%. A work whose registered shares don't add up gets held rather than paid. This is the single most common data problem I see.

Nobody registered you abroad at all. Reciprocal agreements move money between societies, but a society still has to know a work exists and who it belongs to. Registration in your home territory alone is thinner coverage than most writers assume.

Co-writers at different societies. A work with writers at three societies in three countries needs consistent data at all three. One writer's incorrect share can hold the whole work.

Time. Even when everything works, foreign money is slow. It clears the foreign society's distribution cycle, then yours. A year from play to payment is unremarkable, and it means the absence of money this quarter tells you nothing.

What about sub-publishing?

The traditional route is a sub-publishing deal: a publisher in each territory registers and collects locally, keeping a cut. Real coverage, real cost, and typically a rights commitment in that territory.

The modern alternative is administration — one administrator registers your works across the societies that pay songwriters and collects through those relationships, without taking ownership of your copyright. That's what Davincii does, and it's what the publishing administration guide covers in detail.

Neither is automatically better. Sub-publishing can make sense for a writer with real, concentrated activity in one territory. Administration makes more sense when your streams are scattered across dozens of countries in amounts too small to negotiate individually — which describes almost every independent songwriter now.

What to actually do

1. Join a home society and get your IPI. Nothing works without it.
2. Register every work, with ISWCs and splits that total 100%. This does more for your international income than any other single action.
3. Confirm your co-writers are registered too. Their gaps hold your money.
4. Work out whether you're owed on the recording side as well as the writer side.
5. Give it time before concluding anything is broken. A year is normal.

The full directory of societies lists every organization that pays songwriters, with joining cost, payout cadence, and how to register — 29 societies across 20 countries, and the ones Davincii handles for you are marked.

Where Davincii fits

We register your compositions across the societies that pay songwriters worldwide and collect what comes back, with no upfront fee and no ownership of your copyright. We earn a commission only on royalties we actually collect — 15% on performance, 20% on mechanicals.

The work isn't glamorous. It's making sure every song has the right identifiers, that the splits add up, and that the societies holding your money can tell it's yours.