Every time your song is played in public, someone owes its writers a small fee. A radio station, a café playing background music, a festival stage, an online service: each of these is a public performance, and the money they pay is called a performance royalty. It does not come through your distributor, and many independent songwriters never collect it simply because nobody told them how it reaches them.
What counts as a public performance
Listening to music at home is private. Playing it to the public, or sending it out to the public, is a separate use that the writers of the song have a right to be paid for. In practice that covers:
- Broadcast. Radio and TV stations, including their online streams.
- Venues and businesses. Restaurants, shops, gyms, hotels, clubs, anywhere music is part of the atmosphere.
- Live shows. Your own concert counts, and so does a cover band playing your song at a wedding.
- Online. In many countries, part of what streaming and video platforms pay for music is treated as a performance or "communication to the public" and is licensed by collecting societies.
The royalty belongs to the song, meaning the melody and the lyrics. It is paid to composers, lyricists and their publishers. The recording earns from radio and venues too, but that is a different right, usually called neighbouring rights, with its own organisations.
Who pays and who collects performance royalties
A radio station cannot negotiate with every songwriter whose song it plays. So collecting societies do it in bulk. The station, venue or promoter takes a licence from the society and pays fees, often a blanket licence that covers the whole repertoire. The society then works out whose songs were used and shares the money among its members.
How it works out "whose songs" depends on the type of use. Radio and TV usually send playlists or are monitored. Concerts can be reported song by song. Background music in shops is often distributed using samples and data from music suppliers, so very small uses may never be traced to you individually. Rules differ by country, so read how your society distributes each type of income.
The important part: a society can only pay you if you are a member and your songs are registered with it. Your distributor handles the recording side. The writer's performance income travels by a separate road.
Live shows: your setlist is worth something
This is the part independent artists most often leave on the table. When you play a licensed venue or festival, the promoter or venue pays the society for the music performed. If nobody tells the society which songs were played, that money gets shared out using whatever data it has, which usually favours songs that are already well known.
Many societies let members submit setlists after their concerts. Deadlines and formats vary, and some only accept shows at venues that hold a licence, so check your society's rules once and then make it a habit. Keep a simple log after every show:
- date, venue and city
- name of the promoter or organiser
- every song played, in order
- the writers of any cover songs in the set
Say Lalə Nova plays a club in Baku with twelve songs, eight of them her own. If she submits that setlist, her eight songs have a chance of being paid for that night. If she doesn't, they almost certainly won't. The covers in her set earn for their writers, not for her, which is fair.
Streaming and online performance
Online, the picture is more technical. In many territories, platforms pay one share of their music costs to the owners of the recordings, through distributors and labels, and another share to the owners of the songs, through societies and publishers. Part of that song share is counted as performance income.
For you this means two things. First, your distributor's report shows the recording side. In the CULT dashboard, for example, you see streams by platform and country for each reporting period. That is the recording's income; the writer's performance share is paid through a different chain. Second, the society needs to match the streamed recording to your registered song. That works best when the title is identical everywhere, the writers are listed the same way, and, where your society allows it, you add the ISRC of each recording to the work registration.
Register before the song is played
Register a song as soon as it is finished and the splits are agreed, ideally before release. A typical registration asks for:
- the title exactly as it appears on the release, plus any alternative titles or spellings
- every writer and their share
- the publisher, if there is one
- recordings linked to the work, often by ISRC
If you write with someone who belongs to a different society, each of you registers your own share with your own society, and the shares must add up. Agree them in writing before release, not after the first payment arrives.
Where the money usually gets lost
- the song was never registered
- the title on the setlist or radio log doesn't match the registered title, for example Cyrillic in one place and Latin in the other
- a co-writer is not a member anywhere, so their share sits unclaimed
- concerts happen but setlists are never sent
- the artist assumes the distributor collects everything
An hour spent on registrations and a habit of logging every show will do more for your performance income than any single radio play.