Where do you
actually stand?
Tell it what you do first: record and release, make beats, write songs, or all of it. Then it asks only the questions for that, counts what it finds as you go, and gives you every problem with what it costs, the free fix and the tool that does it. A few minutes. No account, no email, nothing held back.
Most artists are not held back by the music. They are held back by three or four specific things nobody ever told them about.
This finds yours and puts them in order. It was built by people who run a studio and a label, and it will tell you to do things we make no money from, because those are usually the urgent ones. Whatever it turns up, the fix is written out in the handbook, registrations in one section, what a stream actually pays in another. Questions it does not cover go on the Board, and if you want us to hear the record itself, that is the submission form.Ready?
Answer honestly. Nothing is stored unless you ask us to send it to you, and a wrong answer only makes the result wrong for you.
Questions the scorecard raises, answered
What is a PRO and do I need one?
A performing rights organisation collects performance royalties on your behalf. In the United States that is ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. Every public play of your song generates one of these royalties: radio, a bar, a shop, a venue, a stream. It is only ever paid to writers who are registered, so until you sign up your share is distributed to other people. Join one, not several. BMI charges writers no fee to join.
What is The MLC and why is it separate from my distributor?
The Mechanical Licensing Collective collects mechanical royalties from US streaming, which is a different pool of money from the recording royalty your distributor pays you. Registration is free at themlc.com. Because it is separate and because distributors do not mention it, a large amount of mechanical money sits unclaimed, belonging to writers who never registered.
What is SoundExchange and is it the same as my PRO?
No, it is a fourth organisation and a fourth pool of money. SoundExchange collects for non-interactive digital radio such as SiriusXM, Pandora and internet radio stations. It is also the only one of the four that pays the performer and the owner of the recording rather than the writer of the song, so registering with ASCAP, BMI or SESAC does not cover it and neither does The MLC or your distributor. Registration is free at soundexchange.com, and you should register as both the recording artist and, if you own your masters, the rights owner, because those are two separate payments.
What is YouTube Content ID and should I turn it on?
Content ID fingerprints your recording so that when somebody else uses your song in their video, the advertising on that video can pay you instead of only the uploader. Most distributors offer it as a switch and take a percentage. It is worth turning on for most independent artists, but read what it does first: it will also claim your own uploads, and it can misfire on anything containing a sample or any music you do not fully own, which can cause claims against other people unfairly.
How much money am I losing by not registering my songs?
It depends almost entirely on how much your music is streamed, and any single confident figure should be treated as a sales pitch. The anchor is statutory: under the Copyright Royalty Board's Phonorecords IV determination the all-in songwriter rate for United States interactive streaming is 15.3% of a service's revenue in 2026, rising to 15.35% in 2027, and that share is split roughly evenly between mechanical royalties collected by The MLC and performance royalties collected by your PRO. In practice that works out somewhere around $0.0006 to $0.0015 per stream for the mechanical share and $0.0006 to $0.0012 for the performance share, both separate from the recording royalty your distributor already pays. The bigger issue is usually timing rather than size: BMI, for one, generally will not adjust royalties that were or should have been paid more than nine months before it hears of a song, and The MLC holds mechanical money it cannot match for at least three years before paying it out to others. The scorecard on this page estimates a range from your own listener numbers and shows the arithmetic it used.
What is the difference between owning the song and owning the master?
Two separate pieces of property. The composition is the melody and the lyrics, and it pays through your PRO and The MLC. The master is the specific recording, and it pays through your distributor. A producer can own half of one and none of the other. A split sheet has to state both, because agreeing one does not agree the other.
Why does a release need to reach my distributor weeks before the release date?
Because the song must be live in your Spotify for Artists dashboard before you are allowed to pitch it to editorial, and Spotify asks for at least seven days before release, with four weeks being the practical target. Uploading for next Friday technically works, but it forfeits editorial consideration, any pre-save runway, and all playlist and press lead time. Nothing warns you that this has happened.