SoundExchange Owes You Twice. Most Artists Collect Once.

If your recordings have ever played on Pandora, SiriusXM, or an internet radio station, SoundExchange is holding money with your name on it — and there's a good chance you're only collecting half of it. Here's why: SoundExchange pays a recording two shares, one to the featured artist and one to the recording owner. If you own your masters, you are both — so you're owed both. Most independent artists register for only one and quietly forfeit the other. SoundExchange paid out $1.05 billion in 2024 alone (over $13 billion since 2003), and unclaimed money is only held for about three years before it's redistributed. Sizing exactly what you're owed from your real airplay is one of the things a SongBounty scan does.

SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties — the money owed every time your recording is played on non-interactive digital radio: SiriusXM, Pandora, and internet radio stations. This is the recording side of performance income, also called neighbouring rights, and it's completely separate from two things people mix it up with:

• It's not your streaming payout. Spotify and Apple Music are interactive — that money comes through your distributor.
• It's not your songwriter/PRO money. ASCAP and BMI pay the composition side. This pays the recording.

In other words, it's a distinct pot — and one that pays the people who own and perform the master, directly. Which brings us to the part that costs artists the most.

When SoundExchange collects on a recording, it splits the money three ways:

Read that again with an independent artist in mind. If you self-released and own your masters, you are both the featured artist and the recording owner — so you're owed both the 45% and the 50%. But SoundExchange makes you register as an artist and as a rights owner as two different things, and a huge number of indie artists only ever register as one. The result: they collect their 45%, and the 50% owner share — the bigger one — just sits there. Register as one, forfeit half.

Here's the second leak most artists never even hear about. Every major country has its own SoundExchange. When your recording airs on radio, TV, or in public venues abroad, neighbouring-rights royalties are owed there too — collected by PPL in the UK, GVL in Germany, SCPP/SPPF in France, SENA in the Netherlands, and dozens more.

The catch is the same as always: those societies only pay you if you're registered with them, and almost no independent artist is. So while SoundExchange holds your US digital money, a scatter of foreign societies may be holding your international radio money — and none of it reaches you automatically.

You don't have to guess. A SongBounty scan sizes your neighbouring-rights money from your real airplay — it reads the actual per-station radio plays for your songs, maps each country to its collecting society (SoundExchange, PPL, GVL…), and gives you a dollar figure per country. Every number is an estimate — read it as "at least this much" — but it's grounded in real broadcasts, not a guess.

Once you can see it, the fixes are concrete:

• Register with SoundExchange as both an artist and a rights owner if you own your masters — this is the single most common way indie artists recover their missing half.
• Claim the money already on hold — SoundExchange's own tools let you find and claim recordings it's holding for you, but only before the ~3-year clock runs out.
• Cover the rest of the world — register with the foreign societies where you get airplay, or use a neighbouring-rights administrator to collect them for you.

This is one slice of the bigger picture in our guide to finding unclaimed royalties. And to be clear about our role: we find and size the money and show you exactly where to claim it — we never take a percentage, and we don't collect on your behalf. Here's how the scan works.

Digital radio has been playing your music and paying for it this whole time. The only question is whether you registered to catch both checks, or just one.