There are two pots, not one
Every time a song is streamed, it generates money in two distinct places, owed to two distinct sets of people:
- Master royalties — for the recording. These belong to whoever owns the master: usually you, if you paid for the session and never signed it away. They flow from the streaming service through your distributor to you.
- Publishing royalties — for the composition. These belong to whoever wrote the song, and to their publisher. They flow through a completely separate system.
If you wrote and recorded your own song, you are owed both. Your distributor pays you the first. The second only reaches you if you have registered the composition somewhere — and this is the step most independent artists skip without knowing it exists.
Where the master money goes
The path is: listener streams the track → the streaming service pools subscription and advertising revenue for that market → the service pays out a share based on your proportion of total streams → your distributor receives it → your distributor pays you.
What you actually keep depends on your distributor's royalty share. A 90% share means they keep a tenth of everything you earn, every year, forever. On Revocle's paid plans the share is 100% — the plan fee is the whole cost.
Why the money takes months
Stores report to distributors on their own schedules, typically 45 to 60 days in arrears. A stream in January is usually reported in March and payable after that. This is normal and it is not your distributor stalling: nobody downstream can pay out money that has not yet been reported or received.
What you should expect from a distributor is that the moment those funds clear, they are yours to withdraw — not held to an artificial quarterly schedule.
The publishing side, in India
Publishing splits again into two kinds:
- Mechanical royalties — generated when a composition is reproduced, including by a stream.
- Performance royalties — generated when a composition is performed publicly: radio, television, live venues, and streaming.
In India these are administered through collecting societies. IPRS (the Indian Performing Right Society) represents authors, composers and publishers for the underlying works. PPL India and Recorded Music Performance Limited operate on the sound-recording side for public performance and broadcast.
If you are a songwriter and you have never registered with a society or a publisher, your performance royalties have been accumulating somewhere you cannot reach them. That money is real and, in many territories, has a claim window after which it is redistributed to others.
What a per-stream rate really means
You will see figures quoted for "per-stream payout". Treat all of them with suspicion. There is no fixed rate. What you earn per stream depends on which service, which country the listener is in, whether they are on a paid or free tier, what the total stream count on that service was that month, and your own royalty share.
Indian-market streams generally pay considerably less per play than streams from the United States or Western Europe, because the subscription and advertising revenue being divided is smaller. An artist with a hundred thousand Indian streams and an artist with a hundred thousand American streams do not earn the same amount, and any calculator that says otherwise is selling something.
This is why the useful question is never "what is the per-stream rate" but "what share of what I earn do I keep, and what does it cost me to keep it".
Splits between collaborators
Agree splits in writing before release, not after the money arrives. A producer, a featured vocalist and a co-writer may each have a claim on the master, the composition, or both — and they are not necessarily the same percentages. The most common source of dispute in independent music is not bad faith; it is two people who each remember a conversation differently, eighteen months later.
A checklist
- Know who owns your master. If you paid for it and signed nothing, that is you.
- Register your compositions on the publishing side. Distribution alone does not do this.
- Document splits in writing before the release goes out.
- Keep your ISRCs and UPCs in your own records.
- Check what royalty share your distributor takes — and what that costs you over a catalogue's lifetime, not over one year.