Why Music Money Gets Lost at the Border

In my music post I said I'd seen music from the money side as well as the listening side. This is the money side.

I've been working on a product in royalty recovery and rights administration. It's built for artists whose work earns most of its money outside the continent it came from, with a focus on global catalogues for African rightsholders. That focus makes one problem very visible: a lot of music money never reaches the people it belongs to. Not because anyone decided to keep it. Because it can't find them.

This post is my attempt to explain why, in plain terms.

One song, many rights#

The first thing to understand is that a single stream doesn't create a single payment. It creates several, for different rights, owed to different people, collected by different organisations.

Roughly:

• The recording. The specific recorded version of a song. Usually owned by a label or the artist, paid through whoever distributes it.
• The composition. The song itself: melody and lyrics. Owned by the songwriters and their publishers.
• Performance and mechanical rights on the composition, which are often collected separately, by different bodies, under different rules.
• Neighbouring rights for the recording, when it's played publicly or broadcast, in the many countries that recognise them.

Each country has its own organisations for some of these. A song streamed in thirty countries can generate money in dozens of separate pools.

Money follows data, not people#

Here's the key point. Those organisations don't pay people. They pay registrations. Money moves when the data says who owns what.

That means a song needs to be described correctly, in many places:

• Identifiers for the recording and for the composition, so a stream can be matched to a work.
• Writer and publisher splits, so the composition money can be divided.
• Registrations with the right collecting organisations, in the right territories.
• Consistent names. The same artist, written the same way, everywhere.

If any link in that chain is missing, the money doesn't vanish immediately. It sits. It's held as unmatched or unclaimed, waiting for someone to prove it's theirs.

Why it breaks at the border#

At home, an artist often has some of this in place. They're registered with a local organisation. Their local releases are reasonably well described.

Abroad, the chain gets longer and weaker:

• The foreign organisation needs to know the work exists. That usually depends on agreements between organisations, or on a publisher with reach in that country. Many independent artists have neither.
• Metadata degrades as it travels. A name with an accent, a transliteration, a featured artist listed differently. Each copy of the data is a chance to break the match.
• Splits are often never written down. A song written by three people in a room works fine until money needs to be divided by a computer in another country.
• Nobody is watching. If you don't know a song is popular somewhere, you don't know there's money to look for.

So the songs travel, and the money gets stuck at each border they cross.

Unclaimed doesn't mean safe#

It would be one thing if unmatched money just waited forever. It often doesn't.

Organisations hold unmatched royalties for a period, and the rules about what happens after that vary by place and by type of right. In some cases, money that's never claimed is eventually distributed to other rightsholders, usually based on market share. In practice, that can mean the biggest catalogues end up with money that belonged to small ones.

The specifics differ from one organisation to the next, and I won't pretend there's a single rule. But the shape is consistent enough to act on: the longer money goes unclaimed, the more likely it is that someone else gets it. Time is part of the problem.

What recovery actually looks like#

Royalty recovery sounds dramatic. Most of it is careful data work:

1. Build an accurate catalogue. Every release, every recording, every composition, with identifiers and the people involved.
2. Get the splits agreed and written down. Who wrote what, who owns what share.
3. Register everywhere it matters. With the right organisations in the territories where the music is actually being played.
4. Find where the music earns. Streaming and listening data shows which countries matter for which songs.
5. Match and claim. Compare what's registered with what's been collected, and chase what's missing.
6. Keep it current. Every new release restarts the process.

None of those steps is glamorous. All of them are where money is either found or lost.

Where software helps#

This is the part I find interesting as a builder. Most of the work is data that's spread across many places and described inconsistently. That's exactly the kind of problem software is good at.

Some of the things a product can do:

• Hold one source of truth for the catalogue, so every registration starts from the same, correct data.
• Make splits a first-class record, agreed by everyone involved, not a note in someone's email.
• Connect to listening data, so you can see where a song is earning and where it should be.
• Track registrations by territory, so gaps are visible instead of discovered years later.
• Support the people around an artist. Managers, producers, songwriters and label reps all touch the catalogue, and each needs the right level of access.

It also has to be careful. A product like this holds contracts, payment details and personal information for people across many countries. Strict tenant isolation, least-privilege access and authorisation checks on every read and write aren't extras. They're the baseline.

What an artist can do today#

Even without any special tools, a few habits close a lot of the gap:

• Write splits down at the time a song is written, and get everyone to agree to them.
• Use one spelling of every name, for yourself and your collaborators, everywhere.
• Keep identifiers for every release in one place you control, not only in a distributor's dashboard.
• Register with a collecting organisation, and ask how your works are represented abroad.
• Look at where you're being played. If a country keeps showing up in your listening data, ask who is collecting there.

None of these takes long. Each one removes a reason for money to get stuck.

Why this matters to me#

I spent years on the listening side of music, thinking about how it should feel to find and play a song. The money side is less visible, but it decides whether the people making that music can keep doing it.

A global audience should be good news for an artist. Right now, for many of them, it's a list of countries where their songs are earning money they'll never see. Fixing that is mostly unglamorous work with data. That's exactly why it's worth doing well.

The takeaway#

Music money follows data, not people. When a song crosses a border, every gap in its identifiers, splits and registrations becomes a place where royalties get stuck, and unclaimed money doesn't wait forever. Recovery is careful catalogue work, and it's the kind of work software can make faster, more complete and harder to get wrong.