A single song earns in more places than most artists ever check. Streams, radio spins, a fan's cover video, a scene in a film, each one creates a different royalty, paid by a different organisation, on a different schedule. This page maps all of it, and shows exactly how Vybe Studio collects each piece for you.
This one idea explains almost every royalty question. A recording you can play is really two separate pieces of property, owned separately and paid separately.
The actual audio file, your take, your mix, your master. If you recorded and released it yourself, you own this outright. This is what Spotify, Apple Music and every other store licenses when they stream your track.
The melody, chords and lyrics, the thing that stays the same if someone else covers it. Whoever wrote it owns this, even if they never touched the recording. This side is where most independent money goes missing.
The short version: distribution alone collects one of these two. If you have never registered your songs for publishing, there is almost certainly money sitting in a collection society somewhere with your name missing from it.
Six income streams, six different payers. Vybe Studio collects across all of them and lands the money in one balance instead of six.
Every play on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer and 150+ more. Pays out per stream, and the rate moves with the country, the subscription tier and how many people streamed that month.
Master + mechanicalEarned whenever your song is played in public, radio, television, a live set, a shop, a gym, a festival stage. Collected by performing rights societies in each country and paid to whoever wrote the song.
CompositionA one-off fee agreed when your music is placed in a film, series, advert, trailer or game, plus performance royalties every time that scene is broadcast afterwards.
Both sidesYour audio gets fingerprinted, then matched against every upload on YouTube. Fan edits, covers, dance clips, shorts, if a video uses your sound, it earns a share of that video's ad revenue for you.
MasterPaid stores still exist, and vinyl never fully left. Each purchase pays the recording owner, and triggers a separate mechanical royalty for the songwriter on top.
Master + mechanicalA performer's share of broadcast and public-play income, paid in most of the world outside the US. Frequently uncollected, because it needs a separate registration nobody tells you about.
MasterFour stages. Two of them are yours, two of them are ours.
Drop your track into the release builder with your artwork, credits and split percentages. We generate your ISRC and UPC, register the recording with every store, and register the underlying song for publishing collection. Registration is the whole game, an unregistered song cannot be paid, no matter how many times it plays.
Stores log every stream, download and view, then close their books at the end of the month and send a usage report. Societies do the same for radio, venues and broadcast, though on a slower cycle. Nothing is estimated here, you get paid on counted plays.
Reports arrive in dozens of formats and currencies. We match every line back to your release, convert to a single currency, apply the splits you set at upload, and post the result to your dashboard broken down by store, country and track.
Your balance sits in your account until you ask for it. Add your payout details, request a withdrawal once you clear the minimum, and the money moves. You keep 100% of what your music earns, no cut of your distribution royalties, ever.
Nobody is holding your money hostage, the reporting chain is just long. Here is the honest timeline for a stream that happens today.
Someone presses play. The store logs it.
The store closes its monthly books and prepares a usage report.
The report and the payment reach us. We match every line to your releases.
Your dashboard updates and the balance becomes withdrawable.
Publishing and performance royalties, which pass through societies in each country, catch up last.
What this means in practice: a release from last month showing ₹0 is normal. Judge your earnings on a quarter, not a week, and expect publishing income to keep trickling in long after the streams settle.
Chasing your producer for their cut every quarter is the fastest way to lose a collaborator. Set the percentages once, at upload, and the platform handles it forever.
Assign percentages to producers, features and co-writers when you build the release. Every future payout follows them automatically.
Collaborators get their own view of what the track earned. No spreadsheets, no arguments about whose figure is right.
Splits come out before the money reaches your balance, so nobody has to send anybody a transfer afterwards.
Songwriter shares are filed on the publishing side too, so performance and mechanical income finds the right person.
There is no fixed rate. Each platform divides its subscription and advertising revenue among everything played that month, so your per-stream figure moves with the listener's country, whether they pay or listen free, and how much total listening happened. Treat any single number you see quoted online as an average of wildly different outcomes, not a promise.
Yes, Vybe Studio takes no commission on your distribution royalties on any plan. You pay for the plan, and what your recordings earn is yours.
Distribution delivers your recording to stores and collects what the recording earns. Publishing registers the song itself and collects what the composition earns, performance, mechanical and sync income. They are different rights with different payers, which is why doing only one leaves money behind.
Especially then. Owning both sides does not mean both sides pay you automatically, the composition income sits with collection societies until someone registers the work and claims it. If nobody claims it, it is eventually redistributed to other rights holders.
Because stores report a month or more behind, and money follows the report. Early streams generally show up two to three months later. It is a reporting delay, not a missing payment.
You keep your masters and your copyright throughout, we never take ownership. Anything already earned before your catalogue is taken down still gets collected and paid out to you as reports arrive.
Yes. The royalties dashboard breaks earnings down by store, country, release and track, and you can export the underlying report as a CSV whenever you want to check the numbers yourself.
Once your available balance clears the payout minimum. Add a payout method in the Royalties section, request a withdrawal, and our team processes it, you will see it move through your payout history.
Release through Vybe Studio and collect every royalty your music makes, from the first stream to the last society payment.