The Money You Never Signed Up to Collect — and It's Accruing Unclaimed
Three systems pay independent artists directly. Your distributor check touches none of them. Set them up once, and the money can start finding you.
Your distributor check is not "all your money"
When you upload to a distributor, you get paid for streams and downloads. That's real money — but it's one lane. There are places you register once that keep paying you for years, and your distributor does not touch them. No one collects that money for you unless you go set it up.
Three places that pay you — on top of your distributor
These aren't hacks or loopholes. They're the official systems built to pay artists and songwriters. Each one is a one-time setup, and each one pays a different kind of royalty your distributor never sees.
1. SoundExchange — pays the digital sound-recording performance royalty: SiriusXM, Pandora radio, and internet webcasters. It pays the featured artist and the master owner. Your PRO doesn't collect it. Your distributor doesn't collect it. Only SoundExchange does, and only if you're registered.
2. The MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) — pays US streaming mechanical royalties on your compositions — the songwriting side, separate from the recording. You claim your works once so the mechanicals from Spotify, Apple, and the rest match to you instead of sitting in a pool.
3. YouTube Content ID — once your catalog is in the system, it monetizes your music across all of YouTube: other people's uploads, reaction videos, background use. Your music earns whether or not you posted the video.
The only two states your money is ever in
Every one of these destinations has a switch. Registered means matched, and matched means paid. Unregistered means it's still accruing — with nobody collecting it for you.
We ran this on ourselves first
We're not describing a hypothetical. When we went through our own Done Deal Digital catalog, we found our own recordings sitting unregistered and unmatched at SoundExchange, and works unmatched at The MLC — money that had been accruing with nobody collecting it. Same story the big three tell every independent artist who never set them up.
Set it up once. Let it pay on repeat.
The fix isn't complicated — it's just easy to never get around to. Register at SoundExchange, claim your works at The MLC, get your catalog into Content ID, and confirm your PRO. It's one-time setup per system, and past money that's been accruing can start flowing once you're matched.
Register and collect only your own real work — recordings you own or perform on, and songs you actually wrote or co-wrote. Claiming someone else's catalog to grab their royalties is fraud, plain and simple. This is administrative help, not legal or financial advice, and every system's rules and payout timing vary — check each one's requirements. And if someone else is claiming your work — a duplicate registration, a wrong owner on your master — that's an ownership dispute. Don't fight it with a self-serve form; take it to a music attorney. No promises on numbers here — just getting your data matched so what you're owed can find you.
See which switches you've never flipped
Run the free checkup and find out where your catalog is registered, where it's matched, and where money might be accruing with nobody collecting it.
No promises about numbers. Just clean data across every system, so what you're owed can find you.