Every stream, spin, and sync your music earns is supposed to generate royalties that flow back to you. In practice, a lot of that money never arrives — not because nobody owes it to you, but because the systems that pay it out can't figure out who you are.
Collection societies worldwide sit on enormous pools of unmatched royalties — money earned by real songs that couldn't be connected to a registered owner. When The Mechanical Licensing Collective launched in the U.S., digital services transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in historical unmatched royalties alone. Some of that money belongs to artists like you. If your catalogue has registration gaps, some of it might literally be yours.
Where the money leaks out
1. Songs that were never registered at all
Releasing a song through a distributor gets it onto Spotify — it does not register the composition with your PRO, the MLC, or SoundExchange. Each of those is a separate registration, and each one you skip is a royalty stream you simply don't collect. Many artists register their first few singles carefully, then get busy and stop.
2. Mismatched writer names
You released as your artist name, registered with your PRO under your legal name, and your co-writer spelled your name differently on their registration. To a matching algorithm, those are three different people. Royalties for 'matched' works pay out; everything else sits in limbo and can eventually be distributed to other rightsholders.
3. Missing or wrong identifiers
Your ISWC, ISRC, and IPI number are how the industry's databases connect your recording, your composition, and you. A missing ISWC or an IPI typo means matching fails silently. Nobody emails you about it — the money just doesn't come.
4. Splits that don't line up
If you and your co-writer registered the same song with different split percentages, many societies put the work into conflict and hold payment until it's resolved. This is exactly the problem a signed split sheet prevents — but if the registrations already disagree, someone has to find and fix them.
5. Nobody registered with SoundExchange
Digital performance royalties from internet radio and satellite radio are paid only through SoundExchange. If you never registered — or your producer was promised a share but no Letter of Direction was filed — that stream has been accruing without you.
How to find out what you're owed
The good news: none of this is unfixable. Registrations can be corrected, conflicts resolved, and most societies let you claim backdated royalties within their held period. The work is tedious rather than difficult — searching each database, comparing every writer name, split, and identifier against every release, and fixing what doesn't match.
You can do it yourself with a spreadsheet and patience — our step-by-step registration checklist walks through the whole process. Or you can have it done for you: our Catalogue Audit checks every work in your catalogue across your PRO, the MLC, and SoundExchange, and hands you a gap report showing exactly what's broken, what it's likely costing you, and how to fix it.
Either way, do it before your next release adds another layer to the pile. Money that sits unmatched too long doesn't wait for you forever.