How To Track Royalty Payments for Music
The best tools and organizations for musicians who need help with tracking their secondary income stream
If you’re a musician at any stage of your career, you’ve probably already learned two important lessons:
Music publishing can be complicated, and…
Every penny counts.
But when you’re first getting started, learning how to track royalty payments for music you’ve written or recorded is probably towards the bottom of your list of priorities. You just want people to listen! But while the music should always come first, you also have to think like a business person.
Those first few royalty deposits from your PRO, publisher, or digital distributor often feel great, but odds are you aren’t paying your bills just yet. But what happens when your momentum picks up and all you’ve got are mental notes and a semi-updated Google sheet? You’ll need some tools specifically designed to track royalty payments for music.
Learn more about every aspect of music finance with Music Finance: The Ultimate Guide.
Resources to help you track royalty payments for music
Before you do anything, you should make sure your catalog of music is properly registered with a PRO: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are the three largest in the United States (and for simplicity’s sake, we’re going to assume you’re an American musician). Check out this blog post that breaks down all of the different collection organizations and how you can (and should) take advantage of their services.
Once that’s done, global publishing administrators like Songtrust and Sentric will help you collect royalties from around the globe. If you’re just registered with your local PRO, you’ll collect the majority of your royalties in the US – but internationally, you’re likely missing out on a plethora of collection sources, including ones that you simply can’t access without an administrator’s help.
These different admin publishing companies will help with essentially the same task, but they have slightly different pay models. For example, Songtrust charges a $100 upfront joining fee and then 15% of what they collect versus Sentric which is free to join but takes a 20% fee. Poke around their websites, think about which pricing structure is right for you, and make your decision from there. TuneCore and CDBaby also offer similar publishing services, so if you’re using these companies as your digital distributor, it might make sense to just stick with them.
Wondering how to track royalty payments with collaborators and keep all your metadata safe and sound? Check out VEVA Collect. Veva Collect allows you to send and share hi-res audio files, photos, credits, metadata and more, creating your Virtual Vault – and with bank level security, no less. Keep your stems, mixes, masters, and all your songwriting splits in one safe place. For artists and managers who collaborate a lot, a tool like VEVA Collect is invaluable for storing all of those many moving parts.
Still need help? Allow us to suggest…
Trqk is a great performance royalty-tracking solution, especially for independent artists. Trqk’s music royalty intelligence helps track, identify, and understand all of your performance royalties in one intuitive dashboard. Upload statements from your PRO and snippets of your compositions, and our sophisticated Audio Content Recognition engine can even detect on-air works that you might not know about. Gap analysis will show you what’s actually running on-air versus what’s being reported and paid out, while our root cause analysis tool can pinpoint the missing registrations, messed up cue sheets, or any other oversight or human error that’s keeping you from collecting the royalty payments your music has rightfully earned.
Not only that, but our visuals and data analytics will help you track royalty payments automatically and gain valuable insight into your top publishers, catalogs, and libraries while giving you the power to improve your licensing deals with solid data. Our TrqkIQ Insights Index offers industry benchmarks and cross-industry royalty data to help you negotiate your true value.
You can get started with a free 14-day trial right now.
With these resources in hand, you should feel confident in not only collecting all of the royalties you are earning, but also in putting that data to use. Collaborate more freely, understand your business better, and know where and how to drive for the best possible licensing deals. And the best part is using these tools will save you time and brain space for doing the thing you love: making music.
Still have more questions? Get in touch! We’d be happy to give you a demo of how Trqk Indie Edition can help superpower your business and make sure you’re getting the most out of your music royalty payments.