Your distributor pays you out of one pot. You just watched the other three, and each opens only when you open it yourself.
Your dashboard is honest about what it holds. It shows what the shops sent back for the recording, and nothing arrives to tell you about the rest.
One recorded song is two separate properties, and a writer who releases their own work is owed money on both of them in four capacities at once.
So this lesson takes one release apart into four pots, names the organisation behind each, and hands you a sentence that shows which of them pay you.
The song and the recording
Write a song, record it, and copyright treats what you made as two separate properties. The composition is the melody, the lyric, the structure. The recording is the one take that went up to the shops. A label deal usually takes the recording and a piece of the song, so paying for your own session is what keeps both halves yours.
Two copyrights, four capacities. Writer and publisher on the song. Featured artist and rights owner on the recording.
Four capacities means four registrations at four organisations, and none of them registers the members of any other. There is no central desk, and nobody is employed to notice that you are missing from a database.
Four pots, four front doors
Every capacity sits behind one organisation. Each wants something different before it releases anything. Read them as four front doors rather than four line items.
The writer share of performance royalties on the song, held by a performing rights organisation, ASCAP or BMI.
The publisher share of that same royalty, which needs a second affiliation there, in a publishing name of your own.
Mechanical royalties on the song from US streaming, held by The MLC, free to join.
Digital performance royalties on the recording from non-interactive radio, held by SoundExchange, which wants two roles on one account.
Your distributor walks through the first door on your behalf and never touches the other three. The empty pots take the same money at the same moment, into accounts that will not exist until somebody opens them.
What a quarter of a million streams pays
Spotify publishes a figure worth doing arithmetic on. Artists who accounted for 1 in every 1 million streams generated over $11,000 on average across 2025, so 250,000 plays in a year is roughly $2,750 of rightsholder money.
That $2,750 divides by copyright before a cent moves. Around $2,145 belongs to the recording and comes home through your distributor. The remaining $605 belongs to the song: half performance money a performing rights organisation collects, half mechanical money The MLC holds, and the performance half splits again into a writer share and a publisher share worth about $151 apiece.
Move the panel below to a year you recognise, then watch which pots stay shut.
Left on distributor only, the panel collects the recording and halts. The writer affiliation opens one pot, and a publisher entity and The MLC close the gap. Two figures behind the arithmetic are estimates: the share of service revenue reaching rightsholders, and how the song side divides.
About $605 of a $2,750 year waits behind three accounts, and every one of the three has to be opened by the writer.
Where the fourth pot stays empty
Those 250,000 streams generate no SoundExchange money at all. On-demand listening sits outside the statutory licence SoundExchange administers, so the fourth pot fills only from internet radio, satellite radio and similar non-interactive services. Register anyway. The account costs nothing and the plays turn up without warning.
The sentence to say out loud
Take your most-streamed release and say this about it, slowly enough that the gaps show.
"On this song I am registered as a writer, as a publisher, at The MLC, and at SoundExchange. Which of those four can I log into today?"
Any capacity you cannot log into is a pot with your money in it and your name nowhere on the paperwork. Four logins is the whole target, and the rest of this course is how you collect them.
Where these numbers come from
The $11,000 per million streams is Spotify's own published figure at loudandclear.byspotify.com, checked September 2026. The 15.3 per cent statutory mechanical pool comes from the Copyright Royalty Board's Phonorecords IV determination. Two figures in the split are estimates, named as such under the panel.