If your music has been streamed, played on the radio, or covered by anyone, there's a real chance you're owed music royalties you've never collected. You're not being robbed — the money is usually just sitting at a collector that can't figure out it belongs to you. This guide shows you how to find unclaimed music royalties: every place they hide, how to check each one, and how to claim them. And if checking six databases by hand sounds like a lot, that's exactly what a SongBounty scan does in one pass — it finds the missing royalties across your whole catalog and prices each one in dollars.
Why so much music royalty money goes unclaimed
Unclaimed royalties are rarely about fraud. They're about friction and metadata.
To collect everything a single self-released song earns, you have to be registered in four separate places — a distributor (for the recording), the MLC (for US mechanical royalties), a PRO (for US performance royalties), and SoundExchange (for digital radio). Almost nobody does all four. When a registration is missing — or your name, ISRC, or songwriter ID is wrong — the collector still receives your money. It just can't match it to you, so it holds it.
That held money piles up into what the industry calls the "black box." The MLC alone inherited a black-box pool of unmatched mechanical royalties worth hundreds of millions of dollars (reported around $424M) when it launched — money earned by real songwriters who were never matched. Your share of that kind of pool doesn't come to you automatically. You have to go find it.
Every place your music royalties could be hiding
Here's the map. Most artists only ever see the first row — the streaming payout from their distributor — and never check the rest.
| Where the money hides | What it is | Who's holding it | You collect it only if… |
|---|---|---|---|
| The MLC "black box" | US mechanical ("copy") royalties from streams | The MLC | your work is registered & matched |
| US performance royalties | "Play" money from streams, radio, venues | ASCAP / BMI / SESAC / GMR | you're affiliated and registered |
| International royalties | Performance money from streams abroad | PRS, GEMA, SACEM, JASRAC… | you're registered with each society |
| Neighbouring rights | Your recording aired on radio / TV | SoundExchange (US), PPL, GVL… | you're registered as performer/owner |
| Cover & remake royalties | Someone else recorded your song | flows via the writer side above | your composition is registered |
Two things worth calling out, because they're where the biggest surprises live:
- Radio pays twice. When your recording airs, it owes money to both the writer (via a PRO / foreign society) and the performer + master owner (via SoundExchange, PPL, and friends). Most independent artists collect neither.
- Every cover of your song pays you. If anyone re-recorded a song you wrote — even a version you've never heard — that generates songwriter royalties with your name on them. (More on how one song fractures across pots in what your distributor actually collects.)
How to check for unclaimed royalties yourself (the manual way)
You can do this by hand, for free. It's just slow and spread across a lot of portals:
- The MLC. Use the MLC's public Songwriter Lookup and Missing Member Lookup to see whether it's holding mechanical royalties tied to your name, then register and use its Claiming Tool to claim your share.
- Your PRO. Search ASCAP's or BMI's member/work databases to confirm your songs are registered and that your splits are correct. If you're not affiliated with a PRO at all, that's US performance money leaking every day.
- SoundExchange. If your music has ever played on Pandora, SiriusXM, or internet radio, you're likely owed neighbouring-rights money — check their unregistered/ unclaimed lists and register as a rights holder.
- Foreign societies. For streams and airplay abroad, you'd repeat a version of the above at PRS (UK), GEMA (Germany), SACEM (France), JASRAC (Japan) and more — each with its own portal and rules.
The catch is obvious: that's five or six databases, each in its own jargon, and you have to cross-reference every song in your catalog against each one. It's doable for a handful of tracks and genuinely painful past that — which is why most people give up before they finish.
The faster way: one scan that checks every source
This is the part we built. Instead of you visiting six portals, a SongBounty scan checks your entire catalog against all of them at once and returns a single, plain-English list of what you're owed. In one pass it covers:
- US mechanical — your share of the MLC's held / black-box pool.
- US performance — ASCAP / BMI / SESAC / GMR gaps where your song isn't registered.
- International — performance money owed by foreign societies where you're streamed.
- Neighbouring rights — recording royalties from real radio/broadcast airplay (SoundExchange, PPL, GVL…), sized from actual play counts.
- Cover & remake royalties — other recordings of your songs you may not know exist.
- AI exposure — whether your catalog turns up in the datasets used to train AI music models, with evidence.
- Metadata gaps — the wrong/missing ISRCs and IDs that caused the leak in the first place.
Every finding is priced in dollars (as an estimate — read it as "at least this much," not an invoice), backed by clickable evidence — the held recording at the MLC, the radio-station log — and sorted into a ranked to-do list of exactly what to claim and where. Here's how the scan works.
One thing we are not: a company that takes a cut of your money. We never take a percentage of what you recover, and we never take custody of your royalties. We find the money and show you how to claim it — you file, and everything you collect is 100% yours.
How to actually claim what you find
Finding the money is step one; collecting it is step two. In general:
- Register everywhere you're missing — the MLC, a PRO, and SoundExchange at minimum, plus foreign societies if you earn abroad.
- Fix your metadata so your works actually match — correct ISRCs, ISWCs, and songwriter IDs. Bad metadata is the #1 reason money goes unclaimed, so this both recovers held money and stops the next leak.
- File the claims — use each collector's claiming tool for the specific held items, backed by the evidence.
A scan turns that from "where do I even start" into a checklist with dollar amounts attached. If you'd rather talk it through first, get in touch.
FAQ
If your songs have been streamed, played on radio, performed live, or covered, almost certainly yes — at least some. The question is usually how much and where, not whether. The only way to know is to check each collector (or run one scan that checks them all).
Search the MLC's Songwriter/Missing Member lookups, your PRO's member database, and SoundExchange's unclaimed lists, then register and claim what's yours. It's free but manual and spread across several portals. A SongBounty scan does the same search across your whole catalog at once and prices what it finds.
It's the pool of US mechanical royalties the MLC collected from streaming but couldn't match to a rights holder — reported at around $424 million when the MLC launched. Unmatched money that sits long enough can eventually be redistributed to others, which is why claiming your share is time-sensitive.
Yes — that's the most common case. Independent artists leak the most because no publisher or label back-office is registering and claiming on their behalf. Everything in this guide you can do yourself; a finder tool just makes it faster.
No. We're an audit and intelligence tool, not a collection society or publishing administrator. We find what you're owed and show you how to claim it — priced in dollars, with evidence — and we never take a percentage. The claim is yours to file, and what you recover is entirely yours.