One song. Up to five checks. Most artists only know about one of them.

A song isn't one paycheck. It's a payroll.

When your record gets played, streamed, or downloaded, it doesn't pay "the artist." It pays a list of roles — and each role gets paid by a different company, on a different schedule, through a different account you have to sign up for. Miss the sign-up, miss the money. Nobody mails you a check for a hat you never registered.

The five hats on a single record

Here's the whole payroll for one song. Read each box as a role, then read the line under it — that's the company that pays that role.

Two halves of every song

Every song is really two things stacked on top of each other. There's the composition — the words and the melody, the thing you could write on paper. And there's the master — the actual recording, the file people press play on. They pay through completely separate pipes.

The composition pays the songwriter and publisher — performance money through your PRO (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC), mechanical money through The MLC. The master pays the recording artist and the owner — streaming and download revenue through your distributor, plus a digital-performance check from SoundExchange. The producer sits across both: paid off the master through their producer agreement, and sometimes paid off the composition too if they helped write it. Same song, two halves, and you have to be registered on both.

1 song. 5 checks. 5 systems.

The math that most people never get told.

One person can wear three of these hats

This isn't theory for us. On different records in our own catalog, Fast has been paid as a producer, as a co-writer, and as an owner — and on a co-written placement, more than one of those hats lands on the same record at the same time.

When that happens, it's not one check that got a little bigger. It's three separate checks, from three separate places, that each had to be set up on their own. The producer money came through a producer agreement. The co-writer money came through the PRO and The MLC. The owner money came through the distributor and SoundExchange. Miss the registration on any one of them and that hat just doesn't pay.

Know your hats, then register for every one

Go song by song. For each record, write down which of the five hats you actually wear on it — did you write it, publish it, perform it, own the master, produce it? Then check that you're signed up to collect for every hat you named. A PRO and The MLC for the writing. A distributor and SoundExchange for the recording. A producer agreement in writing for the beat. The goal isn't a bigger number — it's no hat left uncollected.