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Royalties

Why Am I Only Getting Half My Performance Royalties?

By Boboy Watson·Last verified August 31, 2026·1,893 words·Royalties

This is one of the most expensive mistakes in independent music, and it is invisible. Nothing errors. No form rejects you. You quietly collect half of what your composition earned, and unless somebody tells you, you never find out. Everything below describes the United States system.

Why are performance royalties split into two halves?

You already know a song generates several kinds of royalty. Within the performance royalty specifically — the money ASCAP and BMI collect when your composition is streamed, broadcast or performed — there is one more division:

• Songwriter share — roughly 50%, paid to whoever wrote the composition
• Publisher share — roughly 50%, paid to whoever publishes the composition

These are not two ways of describing the same payment. They are two separate claims on two separate halves of the same pot, and ASCAP or BMI pays each half to whoever has registered for it. The split exists because the traditional music business had two parties to pay: the writer who made the song, and the publisher who exploited and administered it.

Where do independent artists lose the publisher half?

When you sign up with ASCAP or BMI, the obvious thing to be is a songwriter. You wrote the song. You affiliate as a writer, you register your works, and everything on screen looks complete.

But there is no publisher listed on those registrations, because you never created one — and in a traditional deal, the publisher would be a separate company that signed you.

Self-releasing, there is no such company. You are the publisher. ASCAP and BMI do not infer that from the fact that you registered the work yourself. They need a publisher entity affiliated and named on the work with a share.

Without it, the publisher share of your own songs has no claimant. And because DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby only handle the sound recording, and The MLC only handles mechanicals, nothing else in the chain catches it.

You wrote it, you recorded it, you paid for it, you released it — and you are collecting half of one of the four pots, because of a form you did not know existed.

How can I tell if this is happening to me?

Log into ASCAP or BMI and check two specific things.

1. Do you have a publisher account, separate from your writer account? Not a publisher name typed into a field on a work registration — an actual affiliated publisher entity with its own member or account number.
2. On each registered work, is that publisher entity listed with a percentage share?

If the answer to either is no, this is happening right now, on every stream and every play. A third check is worth doing at the same time: confirm that every song you have released has a work registration at all. An affiliated account with no registered works collects nothing from either half.

Worked example: a $400 performance pot, split four ways

Assume a composition accrues $400 of performance royalty at ASCAP over a period. That figure is illustrative — it is here to show the division, not to suggest what any song earns.

Row one is the situation most self-releasing artists are actually in. Row two costs $50 at ASCAP or $175 at BMI to reach, once, and then applies to everything you ever register afterward.

Row three is the co-write version of the same problem and it is worse than it looks, because a co-writer who has not registered their own publisher entity leaves their half of the publisher share unclaimed too. Your registration cannot fix their gap. This is why split sheets and a shared registration checklist matter on collaborations.

What does it cost to fix?

Those are August 2026 figures from ASCAP's and BMI's own pages. BMI's fees are one-time, non-refundable, and not deductible from future earnings.

Note the asymmetry. At ASCAP the publisher half costs the same $50 as the writer half, so registering both is an obvious move. At BMI the writer half is free and the publisher half is $175 or more, so the decision needs a moment of thought rather than a reflex.

Does BMI require me to form a publishing company?

No, and BMI says so directly. BMI's own FAQ states that a new songwriter "will not need to set up a publishing company", and that "creating a publishing company will not mean that you receive more royalties."

That is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, because it comes from the organization that writes the cheques. It also means the correct advice for a BMI songwriter is not "pay $175 immediately." It is: affiliate free as a writer, register every work, and pay the $175 individual publisher fee later, if and when a publisher entity is genuinely warranted — administering another writer's catalogue, a co-publishing arrangement, a label, or a foreign sub-publisher that needs a publisher entity to contract with.

At ASCAP the calculus is different purely because of price. $50 for the publisher account alongside the $50 writer account is a small enough figure that registering both at the outset is the simpler decision.

Does the same split exist at The MLC?

Yes. The writer and publisher division is a feature of the composition copyright, not of any one organization, so it appears at The MLC as well.

The MLC pays mechanical royalties on US on-demand streams to the registered writers and the registered publishers of a composition. If you self-administer, you register at The MLC as both — and it costs nothing there, so there is no reason to do only half. The MLC pays monthly, about 75 days after the usage month ends, with a $5 minimum by ACH for US members.

The pattern to internalise is that every composition-side collector wants both halves named. ASCAP, BMI and The MLC all work this way. Fixing it at your PRO and not at The MLC leaves the same hole in a different pot.

Does SoundExchange split royalties the same way?

No, and this is a useful clarification because people apply the writer/publisher model everywhere.

SoundExchange sits on the sound recording side, not the composition side. Its division is between the featured artist and the owner of the sound recording — a completely different pair of parties. There is no songwriter share and no publisher share at SoundExchange.

The genuinely useful feature is that SoundExchange pays the featured artist share directly to the artist, separately from the owner's share. If a label owns your master, your artist share still comes to you, but only if you have registered. Registration is free.

What is a publisher entity actually for?

A publisher entity at ASCAP or BMI is an account, not a company. It exists so the organization has a named party to pay the publisher share to, and so foreign societies and licensees have someone to identify when your song turns up in their territory.

It does not require an LLC, a business bank account, a trademark or a lawyer. You choose a name, check it is not already taken, affiliate it, and list it on your work registrations. Many self-releasing artists use a variation of their own name or their label name.

What a publisher entity does not do is increase the total amount of money your song generates. The pot is the same size either way. Registering a publisher entity determines whether the second half of that pot reaches you or nobody. BMI makes this point explicitly, and it is the difference between the correct reason to set one up and the wrong one.

Does a distributor or admin service claim the publisher share for me?

Only if you bought a publishing product, and only under conditions worth reading carefully.

DistroKid distribution at $24.99/yr does not touch the composition at all. DistroKid Publishing — a separate paid add-on — does collect composition income, and DistroKid's own documentation states that if you are affiliated with a PRO it collects both the publisher and songwriter shares, and if you are not affiliated it collects the publisher share only. Songtrust, CD Baby's publishing product and TuneCore's operate on the same basic model: they act as your publisher administrator, claim the publisher share, and take a commission.

That is a legitimate way to close this gap, especially if you want foreign collection handled at the same time. The rule to follow is not to do both. If an administrator is claiming the publisher share on a work, do not also register your own publisher entity against that same work at ASCAP, BMI or The MLC. Overlapping claims on one composition create a conflict, and a conflict freezes payment on the disputed share until somebody resolves it — which is a worse outcome than either option alone.

Fixing it, step by step

The mechanics are not hard. The cost is one publisher affiliation fee, once.

1. Register a publisher entity with the same organization your writer account is with — ASCAP or BMI, never a mix for the same account.
2. Pick a publisher name and have two or three alternates ready. Names get rejected for conflicting with existing entities constantly, and the rejection usually arrives days later.
3. Once the entity is affiliated, update every existing work registration so the publisher share is assigned to it.
4. Register all future works with both halves named from the start.
5. Do the same writer-and-publisher pairing at The MLC, where it is free.
6. Register with SoundExchange as well — different split, different pot, also free.

Step 3 is the one people forget. Creating the publisher entity does not retroactively attach it to works you have already registered, and ASCAP and BMI will not do it for you.

The timing problem, said plainly

Performance royalties accrue from the moment a composition is publicly performed. The meter has been running on everything you have already released, and it does not pause while you decide.

Retroactive claiming exists at both ASCAP and BMI, but it is limited, it varies by organization, and it is materially harder than being registered before release. Every week you leave this is a week of publisher share you are unlikely to recover.

If you take one thing from this page: go and check whether a publisher entity is listed on your works before you release anything else. It takes two minutes and it is the highest-value two minutes available to a self-releasing artist in the United States.

I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer or an accountant. Fees and rules change — confirm the current ones with ASCAP or BMI directly before you pay anything.