Registering your music

Before uploading your songs and selling them online, you should first register your music with a collection society. Registering your music is how you get paid royalties.

There are different types of royalties that you can collect. How these royalties get retrieved by PROs can be very complex and goes beyond the scope of this book. However, it’s straightforward to collect royalties. To ensure you’re fully covered for global royalty collection, you should register your music on four platforms that we will introduce you to in this chapter. If you register with all four of these, you should be able to fully collect royalties:

• Register your music as a songwriter with a collection society/PRO (for example, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), or The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) if you’re in the US).
• Register your music on SoundExchange to collect digital royalties such as those on Pandora, SiriusXM...