Royalties
Royalty Matching
Royalty matching connects each play or use of your music to the people who own it, so the money reaches you. When the match fails, royalties go unclaimed — or to the wrong person.
Every time a song is streamed, broadcast, or used, a collector has to match that activity to the right recording, composition, and owners before it can pay out. Matching runs on data: the ISRC on the recording, the ISWC on the composition, each owner's IPI, correct society registrations, and accurate credits and splits. Get the data right and the money flows to you; get it wrong and it doesn't.
The two ways matching fails
Money goes unmatched — sitting in 'black-box' pools when no owner can be identified (over $1B a year) — or it gets mis-matched, paid to the wrong party because of duplicate claims, stale splits, or bad credits. Both are everyday outcomes, not edge cases.
Matching happens in many places at once
Each venue has its own database and its own way to go wrong: The MLC (mechanical), the PROs (performance), SoundExchange (digital performance), YouTube Content ID, and the streaming platforms themselves.
How Notes handles it
Notes' job is the matching itself: registering your catalog correctly across all of these, reconciling what they report, and recovering what was mismatched or left unclaimed. Run a free royalty review to see what isn't reaching you.
Good to know
Royalty Matching: common questions
- What makes royalties hard to match?
- Missing or wrong identifiers (ISRC/ISWC/IPI), unregistered works, and unclear splits or credits. The collector can't tie the money to a person, so it goes unclaimed or to the wrong party.
- How does Notes improve matching?
- By attaching correct identifiers, credits, and splits to your catalog and registering it directly across The MLC, the PROs, SoundExchange, and YouTube — then reconciling what each pays so gaps and errors surface.
- Can mis-matched royalties be fixed?
- Often yes — by correcting the registration data and filing the right claims within each society's window. A catalog review is how the errors get found in the first place.
- How much money goes unclaimed at The MLC?
- Streaming services paid The MLC over $424 million in accrued 'black-box' mechanical royalties at its 2021 launch alone — money the platforms owed songwriters but that couldn't be matched to an owner. It keeps building whenever works aren't registered correctly. The platforms pay it in; correct matching is what gets it out to you.