Royalties you’re probably leaving on the table

Apart from live music, merch and the tiny digital/streaming revenue you get, there is another, actually pretty important source of money: royalties. And this is more than you would think.

When I started to work with IAMYANK, who was already on the scene for many years, one of my first moves was to collect all his tracks, gather all metadata, check if all the songs are registered with Artisjus, our CRO (Collective Rights Organisation) – yes, there were loads unregistered – backfill that was missing, and registered the live shows retrospectively within the allowed timeframe. Yes, I didn’t like this part, it was boring and dull, and even yank himself was discouraging me by saying there’s no point, there will be no royalties anyway. Then the big royalty distribution date came next year, it went up from €50-80 to €600-800, then the next year to over €3000. In this year, when the sum landed at his bank account he sent me a message; a screenshot of the transaction, and said, “next time I try to complain about royalties and Artisjus, please show me this screenshot. I’ll STFU.” Well, I still have this screenshot just in case, but I never had to use it since.

Before you wonder, he is not the kind of mainstream artist who’s always on the radio or on TV, his music is very niche, but still, he has not an easy but sustainable music career, he has no day job, so, like most musicians, he has many different income streams. In his case, these are approximately 20% live music (gigs, festivals, tours, corporate events, he has massive prod costs always), 30% teaching, 25% session & commissioned work (film scores, ads, movies, theatre, other projects), 15% royalties and 5% merch & direct-to-fan (Bandcamp) and 5% grants (e.g. cultural funds). But if your music / if the artist you manage has at least a little bit more “radio-friendly” music, the royalty can be even more, up to 20-30% - if you can get it all. So, how can you get it all?

Two royalty streams - one song (and where they leak)

It is important to understand that a song that you are listening to on your streaming platform is actually two parallel entities: the written song AKA the musical composition and the lyrics (if not instrumental), and the recorded song (what you actually hear). In most cases in our region the writer and the performer of the songs are the same people, but think about US pop stars, who are often not writing their own songs, and a song very often has many composers and lyricists.