The Three-Year Fuse
What happens to money owed on a recording that nobody ever came to claim? Everywhere else in this system it waits. In one place it burns.
Non-interactive digital radio pays a royalty on the recording itself, collected by SoundExchange, the only organisation the US government has designated to administer that licence. More than 3,600 services pay into it.
Unclaimed SoundExchange royalties expire after three years. The regulation is 37 CFR 380.44, and it says no claim to distribution shall be valid after that period.
One licence, three shares
The split is fixed in law and does not move with the service, the deal or the size of anybody involved. Forty-five per cent goes to the featured artists, fifty to whoever owns the sound recording, and the last five to a fund for the session players and backing vocalists.
Two of those three are available to a writer who paid for their own session. The third goes to that fund regardless.
One body, two openings, and the smaller is the one that usually gets opened. Registering as a featured artist claims the 45 per cent, and the larger share belongs to whoever owns the master.
Both roles on one account
Sign to a label and that owner is the label. Pay for the session yourself and the owner is you. One account carries two entitlements, each ticked separately.
Registration is free, SoundExchange takes an administrative fee of between four and six per cent of what it collects, and the second role costs nothing extra.
Half of every play, on a form field. That is the cost of stopping at the first role, and it repeats on every recording in the catalogue.
The clock in the regulation
Three years runs from the first distribution of royalties for a recording, and the funds sit in a segregated trust account until then. After that the collective may release the money against its own deductible costs.
Mechanical money waits. Performance money accrues. This one ends against a wall written into a federal regulation, which is why a back catalogue is worth claiming this month.
Registering, start to finish
Nothing here needs a lawyer, an accountant or a company. It needs your legal name, your catalogue and about an hour.
Registration is free at register.soundexchange.com. Tick featured artist and rights owner together if you own your masters, because adding one later is a second application.
US registrants file a W-9. Everyone else files a W-8BEN, and without it a flat 30 per cent is withheld from every payment.
Song titles, ISRCs and release dates for every recording. Anything Search and Claim cannot find can go into SoundExchange's own ISRC database.
Older releases may already have money accrued. Claim those first, because the oldest are closest to the limit.
Direct deposit drops the payment threshold to $100 monthly or $10 quarterly, against $100 quarterly on a paper check.
Where the fuse stops short
SoundExchange covers one narrow thing, and the boundary is worth memorising because expensive assumptions live just outside it.
On-demand streaming is outside it, and that money reaches you through your distributor.
US terrestrial AM and FM radio is outside it, because the country has no performance right in recordings for broadcast.
Everywhere outside the United States is outside it. Broadcast money abroad sits with societies such as PPL and Re:Sound, each wanting its own registration.
Push the dial past the thirty-sixth month and watch the total fall.
Left where it opens, nothing has burned and the oldest month still has six to go. Push it past thirty-six and the figure at the top stops being nothing, which is the argument for a form that takes an afternoon. Open register.soundexchange.com today and put both roles on one account.
Where these numbers come from
The 45, 50 and 5 split, the free registration, the four to six per cent fee and the payment thresholds are quoted from soundexchange.com, checked September 2026. The three year expiry is 37 CFR 380.44, read at law.cornell.edu. The $600 in the panel divides cleanly across 36 months.