Posting Music on Spotify Won’t Get You All Your Royalties

Here’s something nobody tells new artists: uploading your music to Spotify or Apple Music through a distributor like DistroKid or TuneCore is only part of the picture. There’s a whole other type of royalty out there — and if you haven’t signed up separately to collect it, that money is just sitting there. Or worse, gone.

It’s called a performance royalty. According to Musicians Institute, performance royalties are generated whenever your music is played in public — on the radio, in clubs, at live venues, or on streaming platforms. That’s separate from what your distributor pays you for streams. Two different pots of money. Your distributor handles one. The other? That’s on you.

To collect performance royalties, you need to register with a Performing Rights Organization — called a PRO. In the U.S., the main ones are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. These organizations are the ones who actually go out and collect that money from radio stations, venues, streaming services, and anyone else who uses music publicly. Then they distribute it back to the songwriters who registered their works.

The key word there is registered. If your songs aren’t in a PRO’s system, they have no way to match a performance to you. The money doesn’t automatically find you. It just doesn’t get paid out to you at all.

The Federal Register notes that ASCAP and BMI even have a joint platform called SONGVIEW that reconciles songwriter and publisher data across both organizations — but that only helps if you’ve actually registered your songs somewhere in the first place.

Signing up is free at BMI and costs a one-time fee at ASCAP. You pick one, register as a songwriter, then register each of your songs. From that point forward, the PRO tracks public performances of your music and sends you what you’re owed.

So if you’ve been putting music out and skipping this step, go take care of it. The streaming check from your distributor is real — but it’s not the whole story.