Most independent artists have no real idea whether their royalty collection is actually working. You registered your songs. You picked a distributor. You signed up with ASCAP or BMI and filled out all the paperwork. But the infrastructure that turns your music into money is genuinely complicated — and the gap between what you should be collecting and what's actually hitting your account can be significant.
A music catalogue audit is how you find that gap. The harder question is whether you need one at all, or whether your catalogue is straightforward enough that your setup is probably fine. This article gives you a concrete checklist to figure that out.
What a Catalogue Audit Does (Quick Version)
A catalogue audit is a systematic review of every song you own or have a stake in. An auditor checks your PRO registrations, MLC and SoundExchange enrollment, ISRC and ISWC metadata, split documentation, and historical royalty collection — looking for mismatches, errors, unclaimed money, and structural problems that are quietly costing you.
The point isn't to find out if you're registered. It's to find out if your registrations are accurate, if they match across every platform and collection society, and if there's money sitting unclaimed because something got recorded wrong three years ago. If you want to understand the specific patterns auditors find, this article walks through real examples.
7 Signals You're a Candidate for an Audit
None of these individually mean you definitely have a problem. But if you're checking off multiple boxes, you probably have money that isn't reaching you.
1. You've been releasing music for two or more years.
The longer your catalogue, the more surface area for errors to accumulate and compound. A song registered incorrectly on your first album is still uncollected royalties three years later. The MLC and most PROs hold unmatched royalties for a limited period before distributing them to members through a formula that has nothing to do with who actually wrote the song. Time is working against you if anything is wrong.
2. You've collaborated with multiple co-writers or producers.
Every collaboration is a potential registration conflict. If your co-writer registered the song independently and entered different split percentages, both registrations exist in the system and most societies won't resolve the conflict automatically — they'll just hold the money. Registration conflicts are more common than most artists realize, and they're almost impossible to catch without looking.
3. You've switched distributors.
Distributor switches are one of the most common royalty disruption points for independent artists. When you move from one platform to another, your ISRCs can get reassigned, your metadata can break, and mechanical royalties for streams that happened during and after the transition can end up unmatched at the MLC. What happens to your royalties when you change distributors isn't always obvious, and the consequences can trail you for years.
4. You've changed PROs or joined one late.
If you added a PRO after releasing music, or transferred from one to another, your early catalog almost certainly has performance royalties that never got attributed correctly. PROs don't automatically backfill royalties for unregistered songs when you finally sign up — you need to register retroactively, and even then there are windows. Switching PROs creates its own set of gaps that don't resolve themselves.
5. You've never had a publishing administrator.
Publishing administrators — whether a company or a self-publishing setup — handle the mechanical licensing and collection side of your publishing. Without one, you're likely collecting your writer's share through your PRO but missing your publisher's share entirely. The writer's share and publisher's share are separate income streams, and independent artists without publishing administration routinely forfeit half their publishing income without realizing it.
6. You've never reviewed your MLC registration.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective launched in 2021 and handles all US mechanical royalties for streaming. Registering with your PRO doesn't automatically register you with the MLC — they're separate systems. A significant number of independent artists have songs streaming on Spotify and Apple Music right now with mechanical royalties sitting unclaimed at the MLC because their titles, ISRCs, or ownership data doesn't match what's in the system. If you've never checked your unmatched royalties at the MLC, there's a real chance something is waiting.
7. Your catalogue has grown but your business infrastructure hasn't.
If you put out your first EP with minimal documentation and have been building since, the complexity of your catalogue has almost certainly outpaced the systems you set up early. Metadata that was good enough for five songs breaks down at fifty. Informal split arrangements with collaborators that were fine when no one was making real money become a problem when streaming starts adding up. The bigger and older your catalogue, the more likely it is that small errors from early on have been quietly bleeding royalties for years.
What You're Actually Risking If You Don't Look
Unclaimed royalties don't sit around forever. The MLC holds unmatched funds and distributes them to registered publishers if they remain unclaimed after a certain period — which means money that should be yours gets shared out to other rights holders through a formula. PROs have similar policies. How long collection societies hold unmatched royalties varies, but the window is finite.
Beyond the time pressure, there are structural problems that compound. A metadata error on one song can cause mismatches across multiple platforms. A registration conflict that starts with one co-writer misfiling can block royalties on an entire project. These aren't problems that fix themselves — they tend to grow.
The artists who tend to recover the most from an audit are the ones who've been releasing music consistently for a few years, have a real catalogue, and just never had the infrastructure properly reviewed. The issues were always there. They just didn't know to look.
When a Self-Check Is Enough
Not every artist needs a paid audit. If you have a small catalogue — say, under ten songs, all solo-written, all released in the last year through a single distributor — a careful self-check against a registration checklist might be sufficient to catch anything obvious.
There's a PRO, MLC, and SoundExchange registration checklist that walks through exactly what to verify on your own. Go through it. If everything checks out cleanly, you may be in better shape than you think.
But if you're checking the boxes in the section above — collaborations, distributor switches, multiple PRO registrations, a few years of releases — a self-check will show you the surface. It won't show you what's underneath. The metadata errors that cost the most money aren't always visible in your dashboard. The registration conflicts that are blocking royalties don't always generate an error message. That's the part that requires someone to actually dig.
What the Audit Process Actually Looks Like
A professional catalogue audit starts with a full inventory of everything you've released — songs, splits, ISRCs, registration status across all societies. From there, an auditor compares what's registered against what should be registered, flags conflicts and gaps, and identifies unclaimed or misdirected royalties.
For most independent artists, the issues fall into a handful of categories: PRO registration errors (wrong splits, wrong ownership percentages, missing co-writer registrations), unmatched mechanicals at the MLC, SoundExchange misattribution, and metadata mismatches that are causing songs to be unidentifiable across platforms. Metadata mistakes show up in almost every audit — they're the most common and, in aggregate, often the most expensive.
At the end of the process, you get a clear picture of what's broken and what to do about it. For artists who've been releasing music for a few years without ever having this review done, the findings are almost always surprising — not because the problems are dramatic, but because they're systematic and quiet.
If you've been checking boxes in this article and something is telling you that your catalogue hasn't been looked at properly, that instinct is probably right. The catalogue audit service starts at $497 and is built specifically for independent artists and producers who want to know what they're actually owed. You can read what the process covers and get in touch from there.