Taking on a new artist is exciting — but before you commit to building someone's career, there's a less glamorous step that most managers skip entirely. The catalogue audit. Not the creative listen-through where you figure out what direction to push them in. The actual business audit: are their songs registered? Are they collecting every royalty they're owed? Do the splits on old collaborations match what's actually on file at their PRO?
Most artists — especially independent ones who've been doing it themselves for years — have a catalogue that's more broken than they realize. And once you sign them, those problems become your problems. A half-hour of due diligence before you shake hands can save months of cleanup afterward.
Here's what to actually check.
Why the Catalogue State Matters Before You Commit
The working assumption a lot of managers have is that the artist's royalty situation is basically handled — maybe messy, but functional. In practice, that assumption is often wrong.
Independent artists who've been self-managing their careers are frequently registered with a PRO but have songs missing from the portal, co-writers listed with wrong splits, and SoundExchange accounts they set up once and never logged back into. The MLC — the Mechanical Licensing Collective that's been collecting streaming mechanicals since 2021 — is something a large percentage of indie artists have never even heard of, let alone registered with.
That means there could be real money sitting unclaimed. Royalties that accrued, weren't matched to a registered owner, and ended up in a holding pool. The longer it sits, the harder it can be to reclaim.
Understanding the catalogue state before you sign also lets you have an honest conversation about income. If an artist tells you they're pulling $400/month from their music, but their PRO portal shows only 30% of their catalogue registered and their SoundExchange account is dormant, the real earnings potential could look very different — up or down.
Start With PRO Registration — It's More Often Wrong Than You'd Think
The first thing to check is whether the artist is registered with a Performing Rights Organization — ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC if they're U.S.-based. Most serious independent artists are. The more important question is whether their songs are actually registered, and whether those registrations are correct.
Ask your potential client to log into their PRO portal and pull up a list of their registered works. Compare it against their actual release catalog — their Spotify, Apple Music, and distributor dashboard. Any song that's released but not registered is a song that's not collecting performance royalties from radio, streaming, TV placements, or live performance.
Next, look at the co-writer information. For any song with a collaborator, verify that the split listed in the PRO portal matches what was agreed to. This is where things often fall apart. A co-writer registration conflict — where two writers registered the same song with different splits — is surprisingly common and can hold up royalty payments until it's resolved.
Also check that the artist's IPI number (their unique identifier with the PRO) is attached to every registration. What Is an IPI Number and How Do You Find Yours covers this in detail, but the short version is: if the IPI is wrong or missing on a registration, royalties may route to the wrong place or nowhere at all.
Check SoundExchange Separately — It's Not the Same as Your PRO
A lot of artists — even ones who've been releasing music for years — conflate their PRO with SoundExchange. They're different. Your PRO (ASCAP, BMI, etc.) collects performance royalties from traditional radio, live venues, and streaming services that pay for songwriting and publishing. SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties specifically from services like Pandora, SiriusXM, and non-interactive internet radio — and it handles both the artist (performer) side and the rights holder side separately.
If your potential client has never set up a SoundExchange account — or set one up years ago and left it idle — there may be money sitting there that never got claimed. SoundExchange holds those funds and, after a period, may redistribute them.
Check whether the artist has an active SoundExchange registration as both the featured artist and the sound recording rights owner (often the same person for indie artists who own their masters). If they've released music that was played on Pandora or internet radio and those accounts don't exist or aren't set up correctly, that's a gap you'll want to close quickly. What Is SoundExchange and How Do You Get Paid breaks this down in full if you want to walk a client through it.
Mechanical Royalties and The MLC Are a Whole Other Problem
Since January 2021, The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) has been responsible for collecting and distributing mechanical royalties from streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Before that, things were fragmented across dozens of Harry Fox Agency accounts and direct licenses.
For any independent artist who started releasing music before 2021, there's a real question of whether their songs were properly transitioned into The MLC's system — and whether their metadata was clean enough to match. If The MLC can't match a song to a registered owner, the royalties go into an unmatched holding pool.
This is a significant source of uncollected money for independent artists with catalogue. Check whether your potential client is registered with The MLC, and whether their registered songs match their actual release catalog. How to Claim Unmatched Royalties at The MLC walks through exactly what that process looks like.
Metadata issues — wrong ISRC codes, songs registered under slightly different titles, featuring credits that don't match — are often the underlying reason royalties go unmatched. If the artist has switched distributors over the years, there's a higher chance of this kind of fragmentation.
Red Flags That Should Give You Pause
A few specific things to watch for when you're doing this review:
Songs on streaming that don't appear in any PRO portal. This means performance royalties aren't being collected at all. Could be an oversight or a metadata mismatch — either way it needs to be fixed before you can build accurate income projections.
Multiple distributors over time. An artist who distributed through TuneCore, then switched to DistroKid, then moved to CD Baby often has different ISRCs for different territories and platforms, and potentially duplicate or conflicting registrations across collection societies.
Old co-writer collaborations with no documentation. If they released music with collaborators and there are no split sheets or written agreements, any of those co-writers could come back and dispute the split. This is a legal and financial liability you're inheriting when you sign them.
PRO registration conflicts. If a co-writer registered the same song with different splits, the PRO may have flagged it or put payment on hold. Check the registration status on every song that lists a collaborator.
A SoundExchange account that hasn't been logged into since setup. Verify the contact info is current and that the artist hasn't had funds held because SoundExchange couldn't reach them at an old email address.
When to Get a Professional Audit Done Before You Sign
If the catalogue is more than two or three years old, involves multiple co-writers, or the artist has had multiple distributors, a self-managed review often isn't enough. The number of places royalties can leak — PROs, SoundExchange, The MLC, direct licensing deals, sync placements — is too many to reliably track through a spreadsheet conversation.
A professional catalogue audit goes deeper: pulling actual registration data, cross-referencing across collection societies, identifying conflicts, and giving you a clear picture of what's been collected, what's sitting unclaimed, and what needs to be corrected before royalties start flowing correctly.
For a manager bringing on an artist with real catalogue — anything from one mixtape with five co-writers to a decade of indie releases — a catalogue audit gives you the business clarity to walk in with your eyes open. You'll know exactly what you're inheriting, what it'll take to fix it, and what the realistic earning potential looks like once the registrations are properly set up.
Head over to musicsplitsheets.com/pages/catalogue-audit for details on what the audit covers. There's a manager-and-label tier built for exactly this situation — taking on a new client and needing a full picture of where the money is and what's been left on the table.