The master side of streaming and downloads. Spotify, Apple, Amazon and the rest pay this to whoever delivered the recording, which means your distributor, who passes it to you minus their fee or percentage. This is the cheque everybody knows about, and for most independent artists it is the only one arriving.

The composition side of the same stream. In the United States these are collected by The Mechanical Licensing Collective, which is a different organisation from your distributor and a different cheque for the same play. Registration is free.

Because it is separate, because it is newer than most artists' careers, and because no distributor is obliged to mention it, a very large pool of this money sits unmatched. The MLC took in roughly $424 million in accrued historical royalties covering streaming between 2007 and 2020, and a meaningful share of that has still not been matched to the people who wrote the songs. Registering a work is what lets it be matched to you.

Also the composition, but for public performance rather than reproduction: radio, a bar, a shop, a gym, a venue, a television broadcast, and a share of streaming too. Collected in the United States by ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, and abroad by that country's equivalent society.

It is only ever paid to writers who are registered, and a PRO generally pays from the date a work is registered rather than the date it was played. The plays that happened before you signed up are mostly gone. That is the real reason this is urgent, and the same reason it stops mattering the day you join.

The two big US societies differ on this and it is worth knowing which you are dealing with. BMI's rules require you to be affiliated before the performance happens, so a late affiliation simply loses that money. ASCAP is a little more forgiving and can research and credit surveyed performances going back up to about one survey year, but you have to ask them: it is a performance claim submitted through your member account, not something that happens on its own. Either way there is also a nine-month limit on disputing a distribution once it has been made, so none of this stays fixable for long.

The fourth organisation, and the only one of the four that pays the performer and the master owner rather than the writer. It covers non-interactive digital radio in the United States: SiriusXM, Pandora's radio mode, internet radio stations.

The statutory split sends about half to the owner of the recording and about forty-five percent to the featured artist, with the remainder going to funds for session musicians and backing vocalists. If you both performed and own your master, those are two separate claims and most people register only one of them.

When somebody else puts your song in their video, that view can pay you, but only if the recording has been fingerprinted into YouTube's Content ID and the equivalent systems now covering TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Most distributors offer this as a switch and take a percentage of what it collects.

It is worth switching on for most people, with one honest caveat: it also claims your own uploads, and it can misfire on anything containing a sample or any music you do not fully own, which creates claims against other people unfairly. Read what you are enabling.

Music licensed to picture: television, film, advertising, games, trailers, corporate video. It pays far better per use than streaming and it is the one income on this list where a single placement can change a year. Covered properly in section six.

Separate from what the venue pays you to show up. Venues above a certain size pay licence fees to the performing rights organisations, and if you played your own songs you can claim a share by reporting your setlists. BMI and ASCAP both run programmes for this.

It is small money per show and almost nobody files it, which is exactly why it is worth the ten minutes after a run of dates.

Your home PRO has reciprocal arrangements with societies abroad, but collection across borders is imperfect and some territories require local representation to pay out at all. If a meaningful share of your listeners is outside your own country, there is very likely money sitting in another territory with your name not quite attached to it.

This is the one area where a publishing administrator genuinely earns their percentage. Everything else on this list you can do yourself in an evening.