Answers/Original research/I Paid Songtrust $100 to Collect My Publishing — Here Is Every Dollar That Came Back

Original research

I Paid Songtrust $100 to Collect My Publishing — Here Is Every Dollar That Came Back

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 1, 2026·735 words·Original research

In 2016 I registered as a songwriter, and later I paid Songtrust $100 to be my publishing administrator — the company that collects the publisher half of my composition royalties worldwide. People argue endlessly about whether a publishing admin is worth it for a small artist. Instead of arguing, I exported every royalty line Songtrust has ever reported on my catalog and added it up.

5,030 royalty lines. 73 songs. Usage from June 2019 through March 2026. $261.39 collected, $222.76 paid to me.

Here is what the publisher share of an independent catalog actually looks like.

Method, and its limits

This is my complete Songtrust royalty export, not a sample. Three reading rules:

Collected and paid are reported separately. Songtrust takes its commission before paying out; every table says which number it is showing. The export's own arithmetic is exact — every line's payout equals the amount collected times my contractual rate.

Royalty types are kept apart. A mechanical streaming royalty, a performance royalty and a video-stream royalty are different money with different collectors. Averaging them produces nonsense, so they are reported separately.

Units are not comparable across societies. A "unit" on an MLC line is a US on-demand stream; a unit on an APRA or Meta line reflects different usage counting. Per-unit rates are only quoted within one society or source at meaningful volume.

What this is not: it is one catalog — Hawaii reggae and hip-hop, US-weighted — and it is composition-side, publisher-share money only. My distributor money, my writer-share PRO money and SoundExchange are separate pots.

Where the money actually came from

The composition royalty conversation is dominated by performance royalties — PROs, radio, venues. My data says that for a streaming-era independent artist, the publisher share is a mechanical story. And most of it flows through one pipe:

$189 of my mechanical-streaming money came through the MLC — the US collective that any US writer can join free, no publishing admin required. Sit with that: the large majority of what my $100-plus-commission admin collected is money the MLC would have paid me for a free direct registration. What the admin genuinely added was the foreign slice — APRA turned out to be my biggest non-US collector, ahead of anything European — and the small performance-share pile.

Publisher-share rates per platform

For US mechanical streaming at meaningful volume, per 1,000 units collected:

Same ranking pattern as my recording-side study — Apple pays roughly double Spotify — but at publisher-share scale the absolute numbers are tiny: a thousand Spotify streams put 44 cents into the publishing pot, versus $3.30 into the recording pot.

Publishing money is slow money

The median royalty line arrived about 290 days after the month the song was streamed. A quarter of lines cleared in under ~3.5 months; another quarter took over 2.7 years, mostly lines my statements mark as reprocessing, historical or adjustment. My single biggest payment quarter — 2024 Q4, $98.88 — was largely old usage finally clearing, not a hot streak. If you register your songs today, plan on the composition money describing last year, not last month.

The honest bottom line

Costs so far: $100 registration. Collected: $261.39. Paid to me: $222.76. Net position: about +$123 across roughly two and a half years of payment periods — and the commission went up in 2025 (my statements flip from 85% to 80% payout on mechanicals exactly at 2025 Q1, matching the published change).

Against the same catalog's recording side — about $3,117 from my distributor in the same era — the entire publisher share was one-fourteenth of the distribution money. The order of operations this data supports for a US independent artist: distributor first, free registrations second (your PRO as a writer, the MLC, SoundExchange), and a paid publishing admin only once you understand that what you are mostly buying is foreign mechanical collection and paperwork you could not do yourself.