Royalty Genius LLC is a music rights management agency with global reach. The key focus of Royalty Genius is to get songwriters, composers, and publishers paid from their works on digital music services.

Royalty Genius does not charge an upfront fee to set up an account. We give rights holders 85% on any royalties that we collect on your behalf from the date of signed agreement as our administration fee. For our retroactive royalty recovery service we give rights holders 75%.

Yes. There are two types of music ownership. There is the sound recording/master side, and the publishing/composition side. The labels represent the recording, and publishers represent the composition. Labels and distributors such as Universal, Sony, Distrokid and Tunecore handle the distribution of your music, placing your music in stores like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon etc. The distributors will pay you royalties earned from your ownership of the sound recording. Unless you enter a publishing agreement with your distributor, you are probably not collecting your royalties from the ownership of your composition. Long story short you are leaving money on the table. Royalty Genius is not a digital distributor. Royalty Genius is a music rights management agency. Using a distributor to collect from your 'sound recording' ownership and working in with Royalty Genius to collect your mechanical royalties will add more royalties to your music publishing revenues.

The organizations mentioned above collect performance royalties and pay songwriters and publishers. Royalty Genius collects mechanical royalties generated from sales/streams of compositions and also pays songwriters and publishers. We are directly affiliated with mechanical collection societies worldwide and have direct licenses with some of the digital music services themselves in order to collect your mechanical royalties globally and get you PAID.

Most of the mechanical rights societies that we collect from are able to collect royalties as far back as 2-3 years. In some cases we can collect as far back as the start of the digital music service. We will try our best to retroactively collect all your past due royalties.

Every composition has two sets of rights: the writer share and the publisher share. As the copyright holder/creator, you own both shares. You can choose to transfer all or some of the rights in the publisher share through a publishing, co-pub, or administration deal. Performance royalties have always been split this way, one half sent to the songwriters directly (writer share) and the other half sent to the publisher (publisher share). By signing up with Royalty Genius, you can maintain 100% ownership of the copyright. By entering into this type of agreement instead of a traditional publishing or co-publishing deal, you maintain full ownership of your rights as a copyright holder and instead only transfer the administration rights to Royalty Genius.

Mechanical royalties are paid by digital music services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Royalties are generated whenever a music user obtains a mechanical license to reproduce and distribute a piece of music, such as in album form or as ringtone, digital download, or interactive stream. The music user pays the mechanical royalty collection agency, and then the agency pays out the songwriters and publishers.

Many songwriters make the major mistake of thinking that because they are members of ASCAP or BMI that they will be paid mechanical royalties. To get paid your mechanical royalties, you must be registered with a collection agency that specifically works on mechanicals. Each country has its own collection management organizations. If you anticipate collecting royalties internationally, then you must be registered with the groups in each country in which your music is available. This process can be extremely tedious, and in some cases, the workload can even be prohibitive. If you work with a Royalty Genius we will handle this for you.

The royalty rate per stream for almost all of the interactive streaming services is currently 12.3% of the DSPs monthly gross revenue divided by the number of streams that occurred on the service in a given month. For example, if a service had $1,000 in Gross Revenue in one month and there were 950,000 streams The per stream mechanical royalty would be: 1,000 divided by 950,000 = $0.00105263 then $0.00105263 divided by 2 = $0.00052632 . The per stream mechanical royalty rate in this example is $0.00052632 per stream. Below is the total amount of songwriter and publisher revenue generated for 100% of the composition at the above mechanical license rate 1,000,000 streams = $526.32 10,000,000 streams = $5263.20 100,000,000 streams = $52,632.00 1,000,000,000 streams = $526,320.00

Even if you are in a global music publishing deal or administering the publishing rights yourself, you still could be missing out on digital streaming royalties. Royalty Genius has assessed many compositions that are administered by major publishers that are not properly registered with the mechanical rights societies and digital music services. If the sound recordings are not matched to the composition you cannot get paid! We work with both major and independent publishers to get rights holders paid from the digital services and for alternate versions of their compositions such as remixes, covers, karaoke, live, soundtrack, and instrumentals. Royalty Genius makes sure you receive your hard earned money from your musical compositions.

Yes. There is absolutely no conflict. We collect mechanical royalties which is an entirely different royalty stream from the money collected by PROs.. These are two separate rights, two separate income streams and two separate businesses.

Yes. As long as you control at least 2.5% of a song, you can hire us to collect for you.

Yes. We collect from the new Pandora “interactive” streaming service that works like Spotify. With the new Pandora service listeners can pick specific songs, go backwards, skip as many songs as they want and play the music as if it was their own. Royalty Genius does NOT collect any money from Pandora for its “non-interactive” radio streaming service. The royalties generated from the non interactive service are paid out by Soundexchange.

No, if you have already signed a publishing, co-pub, or administration deal the publishing administrator must sign up on your behalf.

Each time a recording of your song is streamed or downloaded anywhere in the world, the music copyright holder is owed a payment which comes in the form of a mechanical royalty. This is called a reproduction right. Examples of how mechanicals are generated are a Spotify stream, an iTunes download, a purchase of a CD or Vinyl.

When songs are uploaded to the DSPs the music services do not receive the publisher information in the metadata that is sent in to them from record labels. When this occurs the sound recordings and compositions become unmatched in the system. An unmatched song’s royalties will go unclaimed and end up in what they call the “Black Box” . These black box royalties sit unclaimed don’t get sent to the rights holder. The only way for the rightsholder to get paid is for the songwriters and publishers information to be matched with the sound recording information. Royalty Genius uses a proprietary technology to match the two sides of the song together and trigger the royalty payment which is then sent on to the respective rights holders.

If you registered a U.S. bank account you will be paid in U.S. dollars. If you registered with foreign bank account we’ll handle the exchange from USD to your local currency. You will see the exchange rate for each month on your royalty statement.. If you don’t have a bank account registered with Royalty Genius we will pay you via Paper Check or PayPal which will follow their own exchange policy. All payments from Royalty Genius to clients is paid through PaymentHub which is owned and operated by City National Bank/RBC.

Mechanical royalties come from a pool of money that the digital music service collects from advertising or subscriptions. The advertisers pay the streaming services to play ads in between songs. The service takes a percentage of this ad revenue and pays out the rest in royalties to the creators for use of the composition. For subscription revenue, consumers are paying a flat monthly fee for access to the services without ads (i.e. Apple Music or Spotify Premium). A percentage of the subscription revenue is then paid out as mechanical royalties to rights holders.

When royalties go unclaimed they end up in what the music industry calls the black box. Millions of dollars end up in the black box each year, and after some time they either get rerouted to major industry stakeholders or contribute to the collection agencies bottom line. Royalty Genius has the ability to see inside the black box and retrieve your hard-earned royalties.