Digital royalties are fees that service providers such as Pandora, SiriusXM, and webcasters are required by law to pay for streaming musical content. These royalties are paid by the services to SoundExchange, and accompanied with playlists of all the recordings played by the service provider.

It is our role to take these payments, allocate the fees to the recordings according to how often each song was played, and then pay the featured artist(s) and rights owners of those recordings. We have paid out more than $7 billion in royalties since our first distribution.

How Royalties are Divided

Under the law, 45 percent of performance royalties are paid directly to the featured artists on a recording, and 5 percent are paid to a fund for non-featured artists. The other 50 percent of the performance royalties are paid to the rights owner of the sound recording.