So when you write a song down on a sheet of paper or record a demo on your phone, you create a copyright for the underlying composition of the song. This is often referred to as the songwriter’s or publisher’s portion of the copyright. Then, once you go and record that song and release it on an album or as a single, you create a copyright for the master recording of the song. For each type of copyright, there are several different types of royalties you can earn, so it’s important to make sure both sides of the copyright are registered properly.
The great thing about being an independent artist is that you don’t have to worry about who owns which royalties. If you wrote a song and recorded it yourself, you own 100 percent of the rights to that song. But to make sure you’re fairly compensated, you need to register your copyrights with the right organizations so they know who to pay when your music gets played.
We understand that Youtube is a growing opportunity for artists to receive royalties. Is that limited mainly to when an advertiser on Youtube uses an artist’s song, or does that extend to, say, when someone does a cover of that artist’s song and generates revenue from viewer traffic?
YouTube is a complicated medium because not only are you dealing with publishing and master rights, but because there’s video involved, you’re also dealing with synchronization rights. According to Songtrust, a music publishing administration company, music used on YouTube generates four different types of royalties: one for the content owner (whoever made the video), one for the sound recording owner (the record label or artist), a public performance royalty (for the songwriter or publisher), and a mechanical royalty (to the songwriter or publisher as well). Collecting these royalties isn’t always easy though. The public performance royalties are paid out to PROs, so if you’re a member of ASCAP or BMI, you should receive part of your publishing royalties from YouTube that way. PROs, however, don’t collect mechanical royalties from YouTube, so in order to access those the easiest way would most likely be to work with a publishing company or a publishing administrator like Songtrust, Symphonic Distribution, CD Baby, Tunecore, or another company like that.
To earn royalties on the master side of things, you can only collect money from videos that have ads attached to them. YouTube has a content ID system that uses audio fingerprint technology to identify sound recordings. This allows the rightful owners to claim royalties on the sound recordings they own. Again, though, collecting these royalties can be complicated. You could try to work directly with YouTube to identify your sound recordings yourself, but this could take a lot of time and energy, so a lot of people opt instead to use some sort of YouTube monetization service, either through a publishing administrator or as a dedicated service.
Stay tuned for the August 2016 Issue for the continuation of this interview. Click Here to sign up to our newsletter to stay updated.