SoundExchange for Independent Artists: How to Get Paid

SoundExchange is the single organization in the United States that pays the master side of digital performance royalties. If you released a recording and own your master, and any of those tracks were played on SiriusXM, Pandora's non-interactive radio, or webcaster services, SoundExchange has money waiting for you. Whether you receive it depends entirely on whether you registered, and whether the ISRCs match. (Reference card with payout cadence and the international counterparts at PPL/SCAPR is on our CMO directory.)

It's free, the registration is straightforward, and most indie artists ignore it for years. By the time they sign up, there's usually a back-payment claim sitting in their account from previous quarters they could have collected.

Short answer: SoundExchange is the only US collector of digital performance royalties on the master side — SiriusXM, Pandora radio, webcasters. Registration is free. Register both the performer and rights-owner sides, and make sure every ISRC matches.

What SoundExchange is

SoundExchange is a US-only nonprofit organization, designated by Congress and overseen by the Copyright Royalty Board. It collects digital performance royalties for sound recordings — the master side — and pays them directly to:

• Sound recording owners (typically the label, or the artist if they own their masters) — gets 50% of distribution
• Featured performers (the named artist on the release) — gets 45%
• Non-featured performers (session musicians, background vocalists, mixed via the AFM-SAG-AFTRA Fund) — gets 5%

This is the only organization that collects this money in the US. There's no alternative, no competitor, no opt-out. If a service plays your master in a way that triggers a digital performance royalty under US law, SoundExchange is the collector.

What SoundExchange does NOT collect:

• Composition royalties (publishing side — that's ASCAP, BMI, SESAC for performance and the MLC for mechanical)
• Interactive streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music — that's collected by your distributor and remitted to you directly
• Downloads or physical sales — distributor again
• Sync (TV, film, ads) — direct deal between licensee and rights holder
• International neighboring rights — handled by PPL, GVL, and the SCAPR network. See /guides/neighboring-rights

What sources pay into SoundExchange

The rules are technical, but the practical answer for indie artists is "non-interactive US digital radio." Specifically:

• SiriusXM satellite radio — every channel, every play
• Pandora — non-interactive station mode (the "build a station from a seed artist" mode), not the on-demand Premium tier
• Webcasters — iHeartRadio (non-interactive), TuneIn-distributed terrestrial simulcasts, Live365, AccuRadio, internet radio stations
• Background music services — Mood Media (Muzak), Rockbot, certain in-store music providers
• Some pre-existing satellite digital audio radio services and other niche services

What does NOT pay into SoundExchange:

• US terrestrial AM/FM radio — exempt under a 1972-era law that should have been fixed decades ago and wasn't. AM/FM stations pay performance royalties to publishers/songwriters via ASCAP/BMI, but pay nothing to master owners or featured performers.
• Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and other interactive on-demand services — they pay master royalties directly to the master owner via the distributor.
• TV broadcasts — those generate publishing performance royalties (PRO income) but not neighboring rights for the master in the US.

The asymmetry between AM/FM (no master pay) and digital radio (does pay) is unique to the US. Outside the US, terrestrial radio pays neighboring rights too. See /guides/neighboring-rights for the international picture.

How registration works

Registration is free and runs through soundexchange.com.

1. Account types

You register as one or more of:

• Featured performer — you're the named recording artist
• Sound recording owner (a.k.a. "rights owner") — you own the master
• Both, if you released independently and own your masters

If you released your own catalog through a distributor and didn't sign a master rights agreement, you're both. Register both sides.

2. Identity verification

SoundExchange requires:

• Tax ID (SSN for individuals, EIN for entities)
• W-9 (US) or W-8BEN (non-US, if you're a foreign artist with US digital airplay)
• Bank info or paper-check address for payout
• Government-issued ID for verification

Verification typically takes 1-3 weeks.

3. Repertoire registration

Every recording you want to claim has to be entered into your account:

• Track title
• ISRC — the unique identifier for each recording (your distributor issues these)
• Featured performer name
• Sound recording owner
• Recording year, release year
• Album title

ISRCs are how SoundExchange matches plays to recordings. Without an ISRC on file, the digital service's play log can't be matched, and your money sits in the unmatched pool. Make sure the ISRC in your SoundExchange repertoire matches exactly what your distributor reported to streaming services and what's embedded in the master metadata. ISRC mismatches are the single biggest reason payments don't flow. For more on ISRC vs ISWC: /blog/iswc-vs-isrc.

4. Letter of Direction (if applicable)

If you have a publishing or master administrator who handles SoundExchange registration on your behalf, you sign a Letter of Direction authorizing them to receive your payments. Most indie artists handle SoundExchange themselves because the registration is simple enough.

How payouts work

SoundExchange pays quarterly:

• Q1 → distributed in late June
• Q2 → distributed in late September
• Q3 → distributed in late December
• Q4 → distributed in late March

The lag is roughly 3 months from quarter-end, longer than the MLC, shorter than ASCAP/BMI international.

The fee structure is simple: SoundExchange takes approximately 5% as an administrative fee off the top of your distribution. The rest is paid to you. There's no off-the-top fee on top of that, no separate registration fee, no minimum threshold.

Payment methods: ACH (US) or international wire (for foreign artists). Paper checks available but discouraged.

Statements show usage by service (so you see SiriusXM separately from Pandora separately from webcasters) and by track (so you can see which recordings actually generated income). The detail is good — better than most PRO statements.

SX Works (the publishing arm)

SoundExchange also has a publishing arm called SX Works, which handles a few specific functions:

• International Standards — ISWC issuance for some catalogs
• HFA-style mechanical licensing for direct mechanical licenses
• Catalog services for songwriters and publishers

SX Works is largely separate from the main SoundExchange neighboring rights operation. Most indie artists never interact with SX Works. The MLC handles US streaming mechanicals (see /guides/mlc), HFA handles physical and direct mechanical licensing in some cases (see /blog/mlc-vs-hfa), and PROs handle ISWC issuance for most. SX Works is a niche tool.

For the working indie artist, "SoundExchange" effectively means the neighboring rights operation only.

Common pitfalls

Where indie artists lose SoundExchange money:

1. Never registered. Streams accumulate in unmatched indefinitely. SoundExchange holds undistributed funds for several years before they're reallocated to other rights holders proportionally.
2. ISRC missing or wrong. Number one cause of unmatched payments. Audit your ISRCs across distributor, master metadata, and SoundExchange repertoire — they all must match exactly.
3. Stage name vs legal name mismatch. If your distributor reports the artist as "Stage Name" but your SoundExchange account is under "Legal Name" with no link, matching can fail. SoundExchange has fuzzy matching but it's imperfect. Make sure both names appear on your account profile.
4. Featured performer share not claimed. Even if a label owns your masters, your 45% featured performer share is yours. Many artists who signed deals never registered the performer side and left that money behind for years.
5. Tax ID mismatches. If your registered tax ID doesn't match the W-9 or W-8BEN on file, payments are withheld until reconciled.
6. Foreign artist issues. Non-US artists need a W-8BEN and tax treaty information. Without it, SoundExchange withholds 30% for IRS withholding. Filing the right tax forms upfront avoids this.
7. Old releases not registered. Newer artists often forget to register their older catalog when they sign up. SoundExchange's back-payment system can recover some of this if claimed within their statute of limitations, but anything older than that is gone.

What back-payment recovery looks like

SoundExchange holds undistributed funds for previously unmatched plays in a "Direct Pay" pool. When you register and add a recording, SoundExchange checks the pool for past plays of that ISRC and may issue a back-payment.

This is one-time recovery. Going forward, registering before plays accumulate is much better than recovering after the fact.

For new artists with growing catalogs, register every release the day it goes live. For artists onboarding with deep back-catalogs, register everything during onboarding and expect a back-payment in the first or second quarterly statement.

Where Davincii fits in

SoundExchange is on the master side. Davincii is primarily a publishing administrator — we work the composition side — but we also collect the SoundExchange owner's share (the 50% paid to whoever owns the recording) for releases you own, as an opt-in from your dashboard, at a 15% commission on what we collect. The 45% artist share always goes directly from SoundExchange to you: no company can collect it for you, and we take nothing on it.

We do help every artist on our roster register with SoundExchange during onboarding because:

• It's free, the registration is simple, and the income is real
• Our ISRC audit (which we do for the publishing side anyway) catches the same mismatches that break SoundExchange matching
• The metadata work overlaps — registering with SoundExchange uses the same identifiers we're already validating for the MLC and PROs

When we onboard a new artist, the SoundExchange setup is part of our standard onboarding pass alongside ASCAP/BMI registration (/guides/ascap, /guides/bmi) and MLC registration (/guides/mlc): you confirm which releases you own in the dashboard, we handle the owner-share registration under our account, and you claim your artist share directly — that part is free, with no Letter of Direction and no fee from us.

For pricing on the publishing side: /pricing. To request an estimate of combined publishing-side and master-side performance income: /royalty-calculator. To get started with the full publishing administration setup: /signup.