The royalties exist.
They just don't
reach the artist.

The problem

Releasing a song is not the same as registering it.

Getting a track onto Spotify and Apple Music is the part everyone knows how to do — your distributor handles it. But a distributor doesn't register your work with the collection societies, and those societies pay out a large share of what your music earns.

Each society collects a different slice of that money — broadcast, streaming, public play, physical copies — but none of them can pay you if they don't know the song is yours. (Who collects what is the next page.) The money is gathered either way; it just sits unclaimed until someone registers the work.

That's the gap between "my music is out" and "my music is earning everything it should." For independent artists with no label or publisher doing this for them, that gap is where income is lost.

• It's scattered. PPL, PRS and MCPS each have their own site, login and form. There's no single place to do the job.
• It's repetitive. The same codes, splits and society numbers get re-typed into form after form, and one mistyped code can hold up a payment.
• It's confusing. Recording, performance and mechanical rights are different things collected by different bodies. It's hard to know what applies to you.
• It's invisible. Nothing breaks if you skip it — the song still plays. The loss is money that never arrives, so it never feels urgent.