The Music Publishing Royalty Simulator Shows How Much Your Songs Can Really Make

A while back I posted about the Record Deal Simulator, where you could get a good idea of how much you could make from your deal under a variety of circumstances. Now there’s a royalty simulator for music publishing as well.

The publishing royalty simulator is pretty cool in that you can plug in the number of streams and it will then tell you how much money is generated and how it’s split between PROs and the publishing company (if there is one).

It also provides 3 possible situations – unpublished (meaning you don’t have a deal with a publisher), co-published (you have a deal with a publisher that co-owns your catalog), and admin (a deal with a publisher that collects your money but doesn’t own your catalog).

From there you can see what will happen with both streaming performance and mechanical royalties in any deal situation. It even allows you to plug in an information regarding advances, so you can see your net payout after all splits are taken into consideration.

Of course, streaming royalties change from platform to platform, so Spotify and Tidal don’t pay out at the same rates. The simulator allows you to plug that per-stream rate in as well.

Essentially what the royalty simulator shows you is that you can expect about $1,000 in total publishing royalties to be generated per million streams on average. At that point there will be different hands in the pie, from the newly-formed MLC collecting the mechanical royalties, to one of the PROs (ASCAP, BMI) collecting the performance royalties.

If a publisher is involved, part of the performance royalties will be retained as part of the deal you’ve signed.

One last thing, you can see that a great deal of money is potentially collected by the MLC, but you won’t see a dime of it unless you and your songs are registered with them. If you haven’t done that, now is the time.

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