If you've ever released a song and wondered why certain royalties never showed up, metadata is usually the culprit. Not streaming plays. Not copyright registration. The unglamorous, mostly invisible stuff — song titles, performer names, writer credits, ISRC codes — that determines whether you get paid or whether your money gets flagged as "unmatched" and sits in a collection society's general fund.
The collection system isn't one system. It's PROs, the MLC, SoundExchange, neighboring rights societies, and sync licensing registries, all talking to each other in slightly different ways. A mismatch between what your distributor has on file and what you registered with ASCAP can create a gap where royalties go to die.
Here are the mistakes that happen most often, and what each one actually costs you.
Writing Your Name Differently Across Platforms
ASCAP has you as "J. Marcus Williams." Your distributor has "JMarcus Williams." Your co-writer registered the same song with their PRO using your name as "Marcus Williams." To the royalty matching system, those are three different people.
When a PRO or the MLC tries to match a song registration to a usage report, it compares contributor names, IPI numbers, and other identifiers. If the names don't align — even by a middle initial, a hyphen, or a dropped letter — the match can fail. The royalty gets held as unmatched.
The fix is simple but requires consistency: pick one version of your name, register it with your PRO, and use that exact string everywhere you appear as a contributor. Always include your IPI number when corresponding with any collection society or administrator. Never vary.
Listing the Wrong Publisher — or Leaving It Blank
If you're independent and haven't set up a publishing company, your publishing share still needs to be accounted for somewhere. Most artists register the writer's share with their PRO but leave the publisher's share blank — or they list a name that doesn't match any registered entity.
That missing publisher registration means the publishing royalties — which equal the writer's share in value — either go unclaimed or get swept into the society's general fund after the holding period expires.
You don't need a label deal to collect publishing royalties. You need a publishing administrator (Songtrust, DistroKid's publishing arm, or similar) or a self-published entity registered with your PRO. Neither is complicated. Both are worth doing before your next release, not after.
Mismatched ISRCs Between Your Distributor and SoundExchange
Your ISRC is the fingerprint of a specific recorded version of your song. When SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties from Spotify's non-interactive radio tier, Pandora, and SiriusXM, it uses the ISRC to figure out who performed the song and who owns the master recording.
The problem: some artists let their distributor auto-generate an ISRC and never write it down. They then register with SoundExchange using a different ISRC, or no ISRC at all. The usage report and the registration don't match. SoundExchange holds the royalty as unmatched.
The fix: pull your ISRC from your distributor dashboard before you register anywhere. Write it down. Use that exact code on every SoundExchange registration. If you've already registered songs without ISRCs, go back and update them — SoundExchange's portal lets you do this.
Getting the Song Title Wrong (or Inconsistently)
This sounds too basic to matter. It matters. If your distributor has the song as "Running (feat. Mara)" and your PRO has it as "Running" and your MLC registration says "Running Feat. Mara" — those can fail to match in an automated system looking for exact strings.
Featured artist formatting, parentheses vs. brackets, periods, ampersands, capitalization — the collection system is more literal than you'd expect. A title mismatch is enough to send a royalty into limbo for a full royalty cycle.
The standard: whatever your distributor pushed to the DSPs is what streaming services see. Register with the MLC using that exact title — same featured artist notation, same punctuation, same format.
No Signed Split Sheet Before the Track Goes Out
When a co-writer dispute comes up — and eventually it does — the question isn't just who wrote what percentage. It's whether you have documentation that both parties agreed to and signed before the song was released.
PROs and the MLC don't arbitrate disputes. They hold the money until the dispute is resolved through whatever external process the parties use — which can take years. A co-writer can register a different percentage with their PRO without your agreement. If both registrations conflict, the society may hold funds indefinitely.
The only thing that resolves it cleanly is a signed document created before the song was distributed. A split sheet covering writer names, IPI numbers, percentage splits, and master vs. publishing ownership is the minimum. A split sheet template from musicsplitsheets.com covers all of those fields for $7 — something you fill out once before release and never have to argue about later.
If you're releasing to platforms where SoundExchange collects — Pandora, SiriusXM — a Letter of Direction tells SoundExchange exactly who gets what share of the master royalties. The split sheet + LOD bundle is $12 and covers both documents.
Not Checking Your Registrations After Release
Most artists register a song, release it, and never look again. But registrations can have errors you won't know about unless you check: a PRO might not have a co-writer's IPI on file, a mechanical registration might have been rejected by the MLC due to a metadata conflict, or a SoundExchange registration might be flagged because the ISRC wasn't found in their system.
The MLC has a portal where you can see your registration status. ASCAP and BMI both have public search databases. SoundExchange lets you view your registered ISRCs. Checking 30-60 days after release gives you a window to catch and fix problems before a full royalty cycle passes.
Add it to your post-release checklist. Not because problems always exist — but because when they do, catching them early is the difference between recovering money and losing it for good.
The Gap Between What You Know and What Your Catalogue Actually Shows
The reason catalogue audits exist is that most independent artists have no idea how many of these mistakes are sitting in their back catalogue right now. A song from three years ago might have collected two years of unmatched mechanical royalties at the MLC. A feature you appeared on might have your name listed wrong in every registration. A track you placed might have triggered SoundExchange royalties that are sitting unmatched because the ISRC was never filed.
These aren't edge cases. The collection system was built for major labels with dedicated rights management teams. Independent artists who did everything themselves are the most likely to have registration gaps and the least likely to know about them.
The MLC and SoundExchange have holding periods. After a certain point, unclaimed royalties stop being yours to claim. If you've been releasing music for more than a couple of years, there's a real chance money is sitting somewhere under a name mismatch or a missing ISRC, waiting.
A catalogue audit goes through every registration in your back catalogue — every PRO entry, every MLC filing, every ISRC, every split — and surfaces what's wrong, what's missing, and what's still recoverable before the clock runs out. If you've put out more than a handful of songs, it's worth knowing what's actually there.