Closing the Gap Between Royalties Earned and Royalties Paid

At any given time, hundreds of millions of dollars sit in the Mechanical Licensing Collective’s black box of royalties that have been generated but can’t be matched to a rightful owner. It’s kind of an eye-popping number that’s spawned an entire cottage industry of companies that claim to be able to find what you’re owed.

They’re not wrong. But finding it is kind of the easy part. 

I’ve spent the last several years deep in the operational side of music publishing, much of it focused on exactly this problem. The truth is, the tricky part isn’t finding royalties, but knowing how to claim them, how to reconcile issues, and how to untangle what happens when multiple parties think they own the same thing.

Ideally, every songwriter, publisher, and administrator attached to a song to work from the same version of the truth before registrations go out. That puts more pressure on creators and their teams to confirm the details upfront, such as writer names, IPIs, ownership shares, titles, ISWCs, and ISRC links. By doing so it helps prevent those errors from becoming conflicts, duplicate works, or unpaid royalties downstream.

The industry also needs more scalable ways to reconcile that information across publishers, administrators, societies, and licensing bodies. API-supported workflows could help flag duplicate works, split mismatches, missing identifiers, and merge opportunities earlier, instead of leaving every issue to be chased manually through emails, individual portals, and spreadsheets.

There are lots of ways for it to go wrong. One common problem is when a songwriter co-writes a track with a team. Everyone signs with a different publishing administrator. Each administrator submits a registration for that song. Each registration has slightly different metadata, or some missing info. Now every partner in the ecosystem, which could mean dozens of different licensing bodies around the world, is looking at what appears to be two or three different songs. Until those registrations are merged and reconciled, the money may not flow correctly. And right now, most of that reconciliation is pretty manual.

This space wasn’t designed to move at the speed or scale that it currently has to. More artists are now in the system than ever before. Publishing administration, which was once reserved for artists with major label deals or catalogs large enough to justify the overhead, has become accessible to a much wider range of creators. The independent music sector is growing, and a meaningful number of songwriters is now earning real income from their publishing rights.

But that accessibility can also gum things up. When signing up for publishing administration is as easy as creating an account online, some artists sign up with multiple administrators thinking they are being thorough. The problem is that two administrators representing the same writer for the same songs creates a conflict. And conflicts hold up money, and create administrative costs.

Ultimately, more creators should be able to collect what they’re owed without needing a traditional publishing deal. But the easier it becomes to enter the system, the more important it becomes for the system to handle claims, conflicts, and ownership cleanly.

Songtrust turns 15 this year. When we started, the idea was simple: publishing administration should be available to more artists. Since then, the tools have gotten better. APIs are making data flow faster, theMLC has opened up its data in ways that seemed unlikely a decade ago, and more creators are getting paid than ever before.

But closing the gap between royalties earned and royalties paid is not something one company or one tool can solve alone. It will take better technical infrastructure, more collaboration across the ecosystem, and a shared commitment to raising the bar for all rights holders. For us, the job is to keep contributing to that work, so more creators can actually receive what they have earned.