You already earned it.
Did you collect it?
Every stream your music gets can generate up to five separate royalty payments. No single platform pays out all five automatically. The ones you never registered for just sit uncollected.
Registration isn't glamorous, and it's easy to skip when you're excited to just get a track out. But it's also the only part of releasing music where the money you're owed is sitting in a specific, known place, waiting for you to claim it correctly. This page covers what that actually means, and the two ways to handle it.
Two copyrights. Five royalty buckets. Four accounts.
Every song you release creates two separate copyrights that earn money in different ways: the composition (the song itself, the lyrics and melody) and the sound recording (the specific finished audio file). Miss registering either side fully, and that money doesn't come to you. It sits unclaimed, or it goes somewhere else entirely.
Register as both writer and publisher, not just writer — the step most independent artists miss, and it leaves half your performance royalty unclaimed by default.
Learn it yourself, or get the roadmap built for you.
There's no diagnostic or entry-level product in this vertical, and that's fine — registration isn't the kind of thing you triage first. You either want to do the work yourself with the full guide, or you want someone to hand you the exact sequence for your situation.
I'm Josh Gilliland, founder of JG BeatsLab. I've registered my own catalog across five actively releasing AI-assisted bands, which means I've walked every one of these four systems myself, not just read about them. I wrote Unlock Music Rights & Registration because the process is genuinely confusing the first time through, and most of what goes wrong is avoidable once someone walks you through the order of operations once.
This is educational and operational guidance, not legal, tax, or accounting advice. The book and the Release Readiness Plan both reflect my own research and hands-on experience with these systems, not a credentialed legal opinion. For international territories outside my own hands-on experience, the Release Readiness Plan is priced and scoped case by case rather than sold as a fixed product, and any open legal questions (including AI-authorship eligibility in jurisdictions where that's still unsettled) get flagged as questions for a qualified professional, not resolved as if they were simple.