Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Sync Brief. It’s been a hot minute since the last time I wrote anything here. And the time is right to get the Sync Brief rolling again. My time has been spent re-designing the Playbutton website, listening to and working with new artists, and reaching out to music supervisors. If you are interested or know of any artists who are interested in working with us, reach out and submit your catalog.

All right. Let’s get into this weeks newsletter. This week I will be going over the two most important types of ownership for a musician: what you write and what you record. These are the heavy hitters. Every artist wanting to make money from their music must have these copyrights set up. Let’s get into it.

The music industry is well-known for its confusing "black-box" way of handling royalties. Where do they come from? Who's got ownership of them? How do you go about collecting them? Figuring out where your cash is coming from and how it’s made is the first step to actually making money with your music.

There are two ways your money flows when it’s played in public to your bank account. This essay will help you get what those methods are and how you can tap into them for your music, building revenue as you go.

Publishing

Every song you write creates a publishing right, and that right is part of the composition itself. So, the melody, chord structure, and lyrics you put together before recording anything are all part of that publishing right. Copyright kicks in when you finish the song, separate from what happens when you record it.

Now, when your composition gets performed live, on the radio, a TV show, or on a streaming platform, you should get paid for that use. How do you collect that money? Your Performing Rights Organization, or PRO, is the system that collects that cash for you. In the US, there are three PROs: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. These PROs have licensing deals with venues, broadcasters, streaming services, and any other places using music publicly. The music playing in the grocery store while you're shopping? The PROs handle that.

Here's how it works: when your song plays, a usage report goes into the PRO's system and royalties come back out to the registered songwriter. The key phrase here is "registered songwriter." Your song doesn't exist to the PROs until you let them know about it. Want to get paid for your publishing? You gotta sign up and get things rolling.

So what if you don't register? Your royalties don’t disappear; they go into a general pool of unclaimed royalties and get redistributed to writers who are registered. ASCAP and BMI don’t charge anything to join, while SESAC is invite-only. What’s stopping you from signing up? Well, data entry might not be super thrilling. But if you want to see some cash flow in, then data entry will be your buddy.

Before we move on from composition, there's another aspect to consider. The PRO takes care of performances when your song is played in public. But every time your composition gets reproduced by pressing to vinyl, download, or a stream on Spotify, it generates a different royalty altogether. That’s called a mechanical. Same copyright and same song you wrote but totally different collection system. And your PRO isn't involved in that at all.

The Mechanical Licensing Collective, or MLC, does something a bit different. It collects mechanical royalties from interactive streaming services or DSPs. This includes platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and others where listeners pick exactly what they wanna hear. Every stream on those platforms creates two separate royalties from the same song. One is a performance royalty, which goes through your PRO. The other is a mechanical royalty, which goes through the MLC. Both are owed to the songwriter and publisher. Most artists have the first one covered but haven't touched the second.

The MLC just started in 2021, and that matters. They have a big pool of unclaimed mechanical royalties. This is money that streaming platforms paid into the system for recordings they couldn't match to a registered rights holder. Some of that money belongs to artists who released music before the MLC launched and haven't updated their registration for the new system. Some belongs to artists who put out music after 2021 and just didn't know they needed to register separately from their PRO. If you've dropped recordings in the last few years and you're not registered at portal.themlc.com, there's a good chance you have cash sitting in that pool right now.

Master Recording

Record the song and you've made something new. The master is the specific take; the performance, those production decisions, that particular three minutes of audio. It's a separate copyright from the composition, and it can be owned by someone else entirely. That's what a record deal transfers.

The master generates its own money, and most of it you already see. When Spotify pays out, that check goes to your distributor and then to you. That's the master side working.

What you may not see is SoundExchange. It collects digital performance royalties for masters played on non-interactive platforms (SiriusXM, Pandora, internet radio) anywhere the listener doesn't pick the specific track. If your music is getting played in those places, money is accruing in your name right now. It's not mechanical royalties and it has nothing to do with the MLC. It's a third registration, and like the other two, nobody is going to come find you.

What Happens When They Don’t Connect

This is what surprises people the most: knowing about one system doesn’t help you with the other. Your ASCAP registration doesn’t do anything for your MLC registration. Your SoundExchange profile won’t create anything at your PRO. The systems run side by side. There’s no shared database where one organization flags that you’re missing in the other.

Wait, what? Why not?

Well, it’s all about the legal structure of the two rights. The composition and the master are legally separate works. These rights can belong to different people. And they often do, especially when publishing deals, record contracts, and co-writing credits come into play. Since the rights are separate, the collection systems for each right are also separate. The money flows through different channels because the rights themselves come from different sources.

For major-label artists, their label and publishing company handle this complexity. The label takes care of the master side while the publisher manages the composition side. Both have teams whose job is to make sure every royalty stream is registered and flowing. For an independent artist, there’s no label, no publisher, and no staff. That responsibility falls entirely on you.

What it Looks Like When One Doesn’t Work

Let's look at the following scenario

An independent artist writes and records their own music. They know about PROs and sign up for ASCAP or BMI to register their songs. Performance royalty statements start coming in. They’re small at first but grow as their catalog and streaming numbers increase. The artist thinks they’re all set and everything’s good.

Meanwhile, mechanical royalties from every stream of every song are going into the MLC's system and sitting in an unmatched pool. The artist doesn’t know about the MLC so they haven’t registered at all. Or they think PRO registration covers both rights, or they saw "MLC" somewhere and assumed it was just for bigger releases. None of those thoughts are right. The mechanical royalties keep piling up. And after a while, unmatched royalties go through a distribution process and get paid to rights holders who are registered, not to the artist who created them.

Bummer.

Getting Both

The composition and master are separate channels, and the composition channel has two valves. Neither system knows what the other is doing. The only way to collect from both is to open both, and neither system will come looking for you first.

If you're not with a PRO, join one. ASCAP and BMI are free for songwriters. Register your songs, including older ones you haven’t submitted yet. Performance royalties from streaming, live shows, and radio will come to you once your works are in the system.

If you haven't registered with the MLC, go to portal.themlc.com and set up an account. What you're registering there is the work. This is the composition, the same song you filed with your PRO. You'll also link your recordings to it, which is what the ISRC is for: it's how the MLC matches a stream back to the work it came from. You'll need song title, writer splits, ISRC if you have one, and release date. If your splits at the MLC don't match your splits at your PRO, the money stalls. Make them match.

If your recordings are getting non-interactive plays, register with SoundExchange at soundexchange.com. It's free, and it's the only way to collect on that side of the master.

When you write the music and own the rights, both sets of royalties belong to you. Go collect them.

The Sync Brief now drops every other Friday. Have a catalog of music ready to be licensed in media? Submit your catalog today.