Frequently Asked Questions

Performance royalties are generated when your publishing copyrights are broadcast in public

The key performance royalty income streams are Radio, TV, streaming & live performances.

Basic rule of thumb to remember: The more people who hear it, the more money it generates. 

Mechanical royalties are generated when your music is reproduced,be that on CD, Vinyl, downloaded etc.

If a record label wants to release your music, they have to pay a license fee, to do so.

Mechanical Royalties become an essential income stream for artists who sell a significant amount of records.

A performance rights organization (PRO) and a music publisher are both entities involved in managing the rights and royalties of musical compositions, but they have distinct roles and responsibilities:

Each major territory has its own PRO. The UK has the PRS, Germany has GEMA, Norway has TONO, Sweden has STIM, America has ASCAP, BMI & SESAC etc.

Sentric is a publisher member of all of these different PROs around the world, so we take the relevant information needed about your songs and then register those copyrights with all these different PROs to make sure any money they collect for you in their territory gets back to your pockets as soon as possible.

Let’s break it down

Registering songs to Sentric’s publishing portal has never been easier with our intuitive interface, we automatically collect enhanced data using various tools to ensure we’re collecting all royalties.

 we will pre populate the song information to your account. As well as this, once a song has been added to your Spotify profile it will appear on your Sentric account as a suggestion where you can confirm and add any additional details. 

Registering songs, splits and writers to your account in seconds, leaving you more time to focus on your music.

You can still register a song ahead of release date, you do not have to wait until the day to do so! Head to Song Titles > Title and continue to fill out the song information manually.

By registering any new, old or pre-released songs to your account, you will receive any royalties you are owed from your music when it has been: streamed, downloaded, played on the radio or used online.

Once the songs have been added to your account, we will register them on your behalf in over 200 territories and distribute any royalties back to you.

A step-by-step guide registering a song, writer/s and splits:

On the dashboard page, click ‘add a new song’

Add songs and start claiming your royalties

Sign in to your account and register any new, existing or pre-released songs to

Song Registration: Step by Step Guide

Registering your live claims to Sentric’s publishing portal has never been easier with our intuitive interface! 

Register any live claims (gigs, residences, festivals and tours) to your Sentric account in seconds

, leaving you more time to focus on your music!

You can utilise the gigs suggestion tool to simply confirm the information on your live performances and also create, edit and organise your setlists from within the portal.

Why should you register your live performances?

Performance royalties are generated when your publishing copyrights are broadcasted in public: on the radio, television and live performances. Therefore, once you have performed live, you are owed royalties! By registering your live claims, we will collect your performance royalties and distribute them back to you.

For most live performances it is only possible to backdate claims by up to 12 months, so make sure you act quickly and keep your account up to date.

On the dashboard page, click ‘Create a new gig claim’

Add claim and start claiming your royalties

Sign in to your account and register your live performances

Live Performance Registration: Step by Step Guide

So after years of me harping on at you via the medium of this blog to sort out your music publishing you’ve finally listened and got everything sorted with the PRS/MCPS, yeah? (

, if yes and you’ve done it by signing up to Sentric Music then bless you, I’m chuffed you’re on board).

So now you start emailing me, pestering me, demanding my time and attention like a toddler who is craving a biscuit inbetween crafting various trinkets from Loom Bands to a background of Ben & Holly reruns.

“I think this is perfect for Made In Chelsea!”

“If you got our new single on Soccer AM I’ll name my first born after you.”

And here’s the thing; you’re right! Your new single is perfect to soundtrack the love hexagon between Binky & Spencer & Trixy & Felicity & Dappy & Sneezy on Made In Chelsea and the opener of your new EP would fit wonderfully over coverage of Sheffield Wednesday scoring six goals against a gloriously disheveled Leeds during the Sky Sports News round up, but until it’s registered with the PPL then I’m afraid I can’t do a thing with it.

So what is PPL? (also known as ‘neighbouring rights’)

PPL is an income stream that is split between two parties;

So, traditionally (oh that word in these blogs, hey?), the master rights owner is the record label, but more and more is becoming the artist in question in this modern music industry. Basically; whoever paid for the ditty to be recorded effectively owns the master copyright.

The people who performed on the recording

So in the world of publishing and PRS/MCPS et al, the money generated there is for the songwriters alone, but for the PPL it is for everyone who actually performed on the recording.

So if you’re the drummer who doesn’t write anything because you’re, to put it bluntly, an ill-educated illiterate heathen whose only use is to literally hit things with other things, then the PPL is where you’ll earn your money.

So! This means that you have to register with the PPL as two separate entities; as the master rights owner and as a performer. This is important; be sure to register as both or you’ll be missing out on lovely money.

If you have a label then you only have to sign up to the PPL as a performer (each one of you as well, not just the admin savvy bass player who has too much time on his hands backstage trying to tether his iPhone with his Mac to make a gig claim whilst the rest of the band are out there living their lives and taking groupies back to the tour bus).

Once you’ve done everything correctly then you’ll see on the PPL database that your song will have a little green tick next to it as thus:

This, my friends, is where the trusty ISRC code comes into play. These nifty little digits are how royalties from the PPL ultimately work their way back to you. If you keep getting your ISRC’s mixed up with you ISWC’s then be sure to check out 

my blog regarding music industry acronyms; The BLOMIA

Everytime you hear your recording played in the public domain then in theory it generates a royalty that is yours to spend on whatever you wish. Radio airplay, TV airplay, bars, restaurants, jukeboxes, clubs etc.

We regularly distribute significant amounts of money to our artists here at Sentric for their neighbouring rights/PPL income (as it’s a service we offer as well as music publishing) so it’s very important you get on top of this please.

God knows enough musicians complain about how hard it is to make money in the modern industry, often using examples such as Spotify streaming rates to back up their arguments, but then worryingly regularly they’re missing out on key basic income such as performing, mechanical and neighbouring rights generated by gigging/radio airplay/TV airplay etc. because they’ve not done their basic homework on the business side of the music business.

(I’m not ‘having a go’ there I should add, honest – but this is why lovely people like us at Sentric Music are here; to do all this tedious administrative nonsense for you and make you money whilst you pen your art… “

BECAUSE IT IS ART, MOTHER, YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND”

As mentioned above, your music can simply not be used on UK television unless it’s registered with three societies; the PRS, MCPS (both publishing rights) and PPL (master rights). I, as the muppet who pushes your music to TV folk, can’t pitch it to them unless the track is covered by these ‘blanket licenses’, so please don’t ask me until it’s sorted.

(BTW – If you’re interested in getting your music synced then 

I hope that clears that up. Please go and register all your releases with the PPL now. It’ll make the world a better place.

If you would like Sentric to handle your rights holder registrations then

, once completed we can then include your music on the ‘All-Blanket’ sync catalogue and put you forward for further opportunities with our broadcast partners that will potentially see your recordings used on thousands of jukeboxes around the UK.

Everybody needs good neighbour(ing rights)

Life is confusing enough already, isn’t it? Does anyone actually truly understand politics? Because it looks like the politicians themselves actually don’t. The other day I watched a video of Kanye West meeting DJ Khalid on a runway where he’d used his private jet just to give him a pair of trainers, yet apparently it’s us using plastic straws that are killing the environment? Why do I care about my muffin tops so much despite being aggressively aware that there is literally nothing wrong with being a touch overweight and it’s the media who are constantly pushing an unrealistic bodyshape on me in adverts, TV, films, magazines etc and what’s more, even if I did put in the daft amount of time and effort it would take to look like consumerism says I should, I guarantee it won’t make me as happy as chorizo does. Dear lord I love chorizo.

With all this running around our collective minds, I thought it’d be only right to help make one less thing confusing for you. That thing is the outrageously convoluted world of digital publishing royalties and how Sentric collects them. Basically, if you’re getting decent streaming numbers across any of the big platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Prime etc) then being on top of your digital publishing income is key, because if you don’t collect it efficiently and properly then you could be missing out on rather good money.

So…when a stream happens it generates a royalty for your master rights and a royalty for your publishing rights.

For the ease of understanding, throughout this blog we’re going to assume that 1,000,000 streams on Spotify generates a total of £5,000 in royalties, which is approximately right (taken as an average of the years of distributions we’ve had at Sentric). There are obviously loads of ‘what ifs and maybes’ here including the territory it was streamed in, if the streams came from free or premium accounts and other voodoo and witchcraft that’s forever to be kept hidden thanks to NDAs.

You would generally expect around 80% of the income generated to go to the master rights owner to be distributed to you by your record label or digital distributor. I’m not going to go into the reason why the master rights gets so much more than the publishing rights here as it’s a bit of a minefield, but it’s essentially a hangover from the music industry’s previous practices. I can thoroughly recommend this 

 if you wanted to educate yourself more there.

Now, the remaining 20% which is the publishing income is then split again into a performance royalty and a mechanical royalty. Usually this is split 50/50 so it’d look like this for 1,000,000 streams:

£500 – Publishing Digital Performance Income

£500 – Publishing Digital Mechanical Income

I say ‘usually’ because of another wonderful quirk of the music publishing industry. Depending on the territory those streams happened and the local PRO 

(don’t know what a PRO is? Then read here)

, they might be split 65/35 rather than 50/50. BUT, as this is all about simplifying things let’s stick with the 50/50 split because that’s what PROs in the UK, US and Canada do.

So, let’s say those million streams happened in ten different European countries, miraculously as a dead even split (so therefore 100k streams per country). That means each country’s publishing income breakdown would be:

£50 – Publishing Digital Performance Income

£50 – Publishing Digital Mechanical Income

So now we’re essentially talking about a micropayment (a stream) broken down into a further micropayment (20% for the publishing income) which is then split in half (one for performance, one for mechanical) and then that’s split into ten further micropayments as it’s spread across ten different territories.

That sentence alone should hopefully show you just how many gaps there are for this income to get lost in. Mind bending at times, isn’t it?

Several years ago at Sentric we realised that the distribution of these royalties from PROs around the world were, frankly, not great and we identified that our songwriters were missing out on income they deserved for their hard work. Therefore we decided to take away the rights from the local PROs to collect the digital income on our behalf, and instead put them with a rather forward thinking company called AMRA.

AMRA directly licenses our songwriters’ digital mechanical rights, (and in some territories, the performance rights as well), to all the major online stores in well over 100 territories worldwide (excluding the US where Sentric collects directly via the local socieites including ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and Harry Fox) Therefore that means Sentric now collects that income like so:

10 x £50 – Publishing Digital Performance Income from each individual PRO that Sentric are members of and have directly registered your copyrights with.

£500 – Publishing Digital Mechanical Income via AMRA.

Now, the great thing here is that the income we receive from the PROs and from AMRA should match up with it being a 50/50 split. So say if from AMRA we receive £50 in digital mechanical royalties from your music being streamed in the UK, but we only receive £36 in digital performance royalties from the PRS, it allows us to go to the PRS and say; 

“Oi, now then, you clearly have underpaid our songwriter £14 and we have the data from AMRA to prove it”.

Simply put, since we started collecting digital royalties via this model, we’ve seen a 400% increase in digital publishing royalties paid out to our artists in just three years.

In the example above, if you weren’t using Sentric and, say, were just a member of your local PRO (ergo the PRS if you’re reading this in the UK), then you’d be relying on nine other PROs around Europe (who your copyrights aren’t registered with) figuring out who you are and with what PRO you are affiliated with. Then all of them would have to pay the PRS your performance income share (after taking a cut) who would then distribute it to you (after taking a cut themselves too). A process that *can* happen, in theory, and if it did, could take years for the money to find its way into your bank account. And also, if you’re not a member of the MCPS then you can essentially kiss goodbye to that mechanical income share.

Basically, if you’re starting to see significant streams for your music on digital platforms, then you really should use Sentric Music’s service. And if you’re already using our service, then go treat yourself to a biscuit, because you’re one of the clever ones.

Income $treams – How We Collect Your Digital Publishing Income

Funding is incredible, isn’t it? Just the sheer fact that you can ask someone for a sum of money you don’t have to pay back, so you can go and do that thing you love is absolutely mind-blowing.

What’s even better is there’s now a number of options out there for all levels of funding, from PRS Foundation’s Momentum and Hit Maker funds, to Help Musicians’ #DoItDifferently and of course, our very own Sentric Academy Fund. You now have the luxury of being able to pick the fund that applies to your exact needs and objectives.

 competitive and incredibly hard to land, meaning you need to make your submission as strong as possible so that you stand out from the crowd. Luckily for you, trusty old Sentric is here to help you do just that. Below you will find our top tips when applying for funding, that will hopefully help you along the way to a great application. Let’s dive in…

Just because funding is available doesn’t mean you should always apply. Wait until you’re at a point where you meet the guidelines outlined by the funding provider and then start applying

Funding is incredibly competitive so you have to make sure you submit the strongest application possible. Most funding applications will take anywhere between 45 minutes – 2 hours to complete, so give yourself plenty of time, read and re-read your answers before hitting that submit button, and even ask someone else to read through it for you with fresh eyes. Be aware of the closing date, don’t leave it until the last minute!

I cannot reinforce this enough! You have to make it clear exactly what you want to achieve from funding. Get specific; what impact will receiving the funding have on your career? What will it allow you to do? Why is it imperative you receive the support?

4. Ensure your online presence is up to date

Seems obvious, but if one of the judging panel decides to check out your Instagram and you’ve not updated it for 12 months, or you haven’t tweeted in six weeks then it’s really difficult to make a case for why you should receive funding over another artist who is on it regularly and appears to be more active than you (even if that isn’t the case, perception is everything I’m afraid).

 You don’t have to have every social channel going. If you don’t understand how to use a platform or don’t think you can maintain it then it’s ok to just stick to what you do know. I’d rather only see a well maintained Facebook page, than a neglected Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat.

5. Tell us who else is already supporting you

This is your opportunity to tell the funder about any other person, broadcaster or platform that is showing support for your music. Received a BBC Introducing spin? Tell us! Landed on a Spotify playlist? Tell us! Had a video premiere on that achingly trendy blog? Tell us! By showing that others in the industry are supporting your music is a great way of displaying forward momentum for your music.

The funder will be potentially receiving hundreds of submissions and will therefore have a limited time to review yours. Be cautious not to provide too much information. Provide simple and clear answers, use things like headings and bullet points to structure your answers to make it easier to read.

As a follow on from above, word limits are there for a reason, stick to them and again use little tricks and formatting to save your word count.

Again, sounds obvious, but the more specific and clear you can be on your budget the more chance you have of being successful. Provide a line in your budget for every expense you foresee and report accurate costs. Do not guess that you think something might cost.

 Only request the amount you need. Whether there’s £1000 or £10000 available asking for all of it is usually a red flag. A clear budget will provide an accurate total, and clearly link back to the objectives you have outlined earlier in the submission.

9. If you don’t receive the funding, then try again and again

As I said at the start funding is incredibly competitive, so do not be put off by rejection. You may feel you deserve it and submitted a strong application, but that doesn’t guarantee anything I’m afraid. On average it usually takes three attempts to receive funding, so if you do get a no ask for feedback, regroup and then go again.

Top Tips For Funding Applications

Usually, I think of the weakest piece of wordplay I can possibly muster to title these blog posts (“to their detriment” some people may say), but on this occasion, I felt I needed to shoot straight to the heart of the matter.

Sentric Music has been doing what we do for over a decade now, helping out tens of thousands of songwriters worldwide ranging from those writing their first ever song to those who have sold millions and everywhere in-between. We administer well over half a million copyrights and counting which we’re able to do thanks to the super duper swish McFlashy software and infrastructure that we’ve developed ourselves. So that’s nice.

But one question we get asked A LOT by writers thinking about joining Sentric is this:

Nope. We’re not like the PRS. I can tell you right here and now that although we do indeed like the PRS, we absolutely adore them in fact, we’re definitely not like them.

The PRS (Performing Rights Society) is a PRO (Performing Rights Organisation) and Sentric Music is a publisher.

Each major territory has its own PRO. The UK has the PRS, Germany has GEMA, Norway has TONO, Sweden has STIM, America has ASCAP, BMI & SESAC etc. There’s bloody loads of them. In fact, you can see most of them over on our 

We, at Sentric Music, are publisher members of lots and lots of these different PROs around the world.

If you use Sentric (which I hope you do or will be doing after reading this) then we take the relevant information needed about your songs and then register those copyrights with all these different PROs around the world to make sure that any money they collect for you in their territory gets back to your pockets as soon as possible.

So for example let’s say you play a European tour which lasts for twenty dates across seven countries; if you didn’t have a publisher (or use Sentric’s service) then you’d have to wait for seven different PROs to collect your performance royalties, find out who you are and with what PRO you yourself are registered with as a composer and then pass that to them to give to you (whilst both taking a cut). This creates a massive lag in getting your income, whereas if you work with a publisher (like Sentric, naturally) we will have registered your copyrights directly with the seven PROs in question already so, therefore, you’ll receive royalties from us at the next available distribution. You’ll get more money and you’ll get it faster. Lovely.

And it’s not just performance royalties collected by the PRS, we also administer mechanical royalties which are collected in the UK by the MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society).

Say you’ve had a song take off which has received a million streams on Spotify. Hark at you! Now a fifth of the royalties generated from those million streams are for the songwriters, but where do you collect that from? Well, if those streams came via 25 different countries then you’re starting to look at micropayments from multiple PROs worldwide. Waiting for that money to trickle its way back to you is timely, cumbersome and fraught with potential nooks and crannies for your well-earned money to go missing or unclaimed for. Here at Sentric, thanks to the size of our catalogue, we’re members of a digital-only PRO called ‘AMRA’ and you can 

read a lot more about this glorious world of digital publishing income collection over at this blog.

In summary, it basically means the publishing income generated from streaming services like Spotify and Apple et al from a significant amount of countries comes to us in a single payment once a quarter. Nice and clean! This has resulted in a 400% increase in digital royalties to our artists in the past three years, a trend we’re only expecting to continue thanks to the rise of streaming.

Finally, the wonderful world of sync which is another part of Sentric’s service we’re very proud of. Our in-house sync department (

) are getting our artists’ music used on TV/adverts/movies/games/promos on a daily basis worldwide and have been nominated as the ‘Best Indie Publisher’ at the Music Week Sync Awards for four years in a row now, so they must be doing something right, eh? For more info on sync, be sure to check out 

Very simply put – all we do here at Sentric is add value to your copyrights. And, if you don’t like what we do, or don’t think that we’re adding value, then you can quite simply stop using our service and retain your copyright thanks to how wonderfully artist friendly we are. So it’s a win/win whichever way you approach it.

If you’re an emerging artist and you allow us to look after your copyrights then you’re plugging into the same technology, expertise and network as songwriters who have cuts on songs by artists such as Michael Jackson, Drake, Kanye West, Jay Z, Amy Winehouse and many, many more. If those guys trust us to do a job for them, then it’s pretty smart that the same infrastructure is available for absolutely anyone who writes original material, yes?

As a gent who works for a leading artist management company said to me the other day;

artist who is unpublished not want to use Sentric? It’s an absolute no-brainer.”

I like that man. That man talks sense. I didn’t even have to bribe him.

Music publishing is three things. 1) Boring 2) Complicated 3) Important. Sentric was set up so just as long as you understand point 3 then you can leave it up to us to tackle points 1 & 2 on your behalf.

I hope that helps if you’re still a bit unclear then don’t hesitate to call the office on 0207 099 5991 or drop us an email at info@sentricmusic.com and we’ll answer questions you might have.

Why Sentric Music and the PRS are two different things

Finally, there is the wonderful world of synchronisation. Sync is basically ‘putting music on stuff’, that said stuff being adverts, TV shows, movies, computer games, online promos, apps and all the rest of it (we once ‘synced’ one of our artists’ tracks as hold music for a boiler company in Norwich for a tidy £1k, imagine that).

More than ever artists and copyright holders are increasingly eager to land sync deals because of the money they can generate and the invaluable exposure they can offer.

In this post, we’ll cover three areas of sync. Firstly…

Now these are the ‘big’ syncs that everyone in the music industry is fighting for (and I mean everyone), it’s an extremely competitive marketplace and to increase your chances of landing one it’s best to work with a sync team who really know what they’re doing (like our sync team at Sentric Music who have been nominated five years running as ‘Best Indie Publisher’ at the Music Week Sync Awards *drops mic*).

For your music to be synced on anything at all two copyrights need to be cleared; the master copyright and the publishing copyright. Be sure you know who controls both of these copyrights and that they know how to get hold of one another in case they need to discuss clearing the track in question for a sync opportunity.

Stereotypically the master copyright is controlled by whoever paid for the recording. So traditionally this would be the record label, but in the modern emerging music industry we all know and love, this is now quite often the artist themselves.

The publishing copyright is controlled by the publisher (which is what we are here at Sentric), but keep in mind that a track might have a number of songwriters who may all have different publishers and those publishers might have sub-publishers in various territories – all of which would need to give permission in order for a sync to go ahead depending on where the license is being generated. And I mean all of them – even if someone who owns just 1% of the publishing copyright says no to a sync deal, the song simply can’t be used.

The upfront sync fee is split between the master & publishing copyright holders (which, again, in the emerging artist world is commonly the artist themselves). So a £10,000 sync fee is split £5,000 to the publisher and £5,000 to the label. These two parties almost always receive the same amount of money as one another and this is referred to as ‘MFN’ – Most Favoured Nation – which essentially protects either party from being taken advantage of.

This is why it’s imperative that the two copyright owners are in cahoots and communicating regularly. If a sync deal worth £10,000 (£5,000 per side) was on the table and the publisher said ‘yes’ but the label said ‘no, we want £6,000 for the master rights’ then the client would have to match that and also pay the publisher £6,000, therefore, the original offer of £10,000 would have to increase 20% to £12,000

Oh, look! Another real-life example: Here at Sentric, we represent an artist who released an album which went through a subsidiary of a major label in the States. One of their tracks was up for a small movie trailer for a reasonable enough fee of $35,000 (so $17,500 for each side). We were happy and the band were bloody chuffed (as they had actually split up at this point so this was essentially bonus money), but the label tried to push it up to $20,000 for the master rights and the client didn’t want to pay $40,000 in total so they pulled out of the deal and everyone lost out. Bad times.

This is also a reason why it’s extremely attractive to music supervisors and sync agents to license music which is ‘one-stop’. This means that the master & publishing copyrights can be agreed and licensed from a single contract which makes their life significantly easier. Here at Sentric, if we’re working with an artist who owns their master copyrights we always ask to also represent those rights for sync so therefore we can pitch the track as ‘one-stop’ and therefore significantly increase the chances of landing a sync for the song.

Remember that the bulk of a music supervisors’ job (especially Stateside) isn’t actually creative; it’s clearing copyrights and tracking down who represents what copyrights in which territories. If you can make their job as easy as possible for them then they’ll bloody love you for it. Because we’re all slackers at heart, right?

Well, the factors that influence the fee you can charge for a sync include:

. The more territories the more money you can charge. A worldwide license will be significantly more expensive than a UK only one and you can even go as specific as regions, I.E; North-west only, Scotland only etc.

. The longer the license, the more you get. We’ve done three-day long film festival licenses right up to those which are in perpetuity (never run out).

 Is it an advert for TV? Is it going to be on the radio? Is it just for YouTube? The bigger the usage, the larger the invoice.

 Ultimately this is still the key. The big money syncs still go to the big profile artists. The majority of syncs we do here at Sentric for emerging artists range from £1k to £20k with the occasional £100k+ deal making a pleasant appearance, but until you become a household name don’t expect to be banking any huge cheques in the immediate future.

n order to get your music synced on UK TV, you need to get your music correctly registered with the PRS and MCPS which cover your publishing copyrights AND ALSO with the PPL which covers your master copyright.

I stress the word correctly because signing up with these societies is one thing, but registering and administering your copyright properly with them is another thing entirely (thus, sentricmusic.com, yeah?). For example, if there are four writers of a song and one of them isn’t published or hasn’t registered their share of the copyright properly with the PRS/MCPS then it goes into intellectual property limbo known as ‘Copyright Control’. Whilst in ‘Copyright Control’ no TV programme or broadcaster will ever use that song. Even if it’s just 1% of the song in ‘CC’, it’ll be avoided like a musical plague.

The PPL has nothing to do with your publishing income, but it’s important that you’re on top of this for your music (and bank accounts).

The PPL is an income stream for two people; the master copyright owner (traditionally the record label) and people who performed on the recording itself. So, therefore, if you’re a drummer (again, it’s always the drummer) who doesn’t write any of the songs and therefore isn’t eligible for any publishing income, but you play the drums on the master recording which people buy, then this is where you make your money. And of course; if you both write the songs and play on the record, then you get both sets of income.

PPL income is split 50/50 between the master copyright owner and the performers on the record. The 50% which goes to the performers is weighted 65/35 in favour of the ‘featured artist’, ergo, if you were Adele then you would be the said ‘featured artist’.

So if £100 was generated, £50 goes to the label, £32.50 goes to the ‘featured performer’ and £17.50 is split between the rest of the performers on the record.

If you own your master rights then you need to sign up to the PPL twice; once as a performer and once as a master rights owner (or ‘repertoire owner’). It’s free to join so please be sure to do that. Or, again, Sentric can do it for you if you so wished.

The PPL, PRS and MCPS are paid hundreds of millions of £££ a year by TV stations and broadcasters in order to be able to use the music they represent and by registering your copyright with those societies you are effectively giving them permission to license your music to the broadcasters in exchange for a royalty.

As covered in an earlier slide, you’ve seen the amount of money available from the PRS when your music is used. Again, if you’ll allow me to reiterate the rule of thumb once more; 

the more people who hear it the more money you get.

 You’ll get a PRS royalty every time a TV show with your track in is broadcasted so it also includes repeats. For example, each episode of Hollyoaks is aired seven times (nuts, eh?) and you’ll receive a royalty for all seven of those broadcasts. That royalty will fluctuate depending on the channel; so you’ll get more money for when it’s on Channel 4 primetime than you will for the E4 Sunday morning omnibus slot.

The MCPS royalty you receive however is a one-off payment which is for the ‘commitment of the music to the picture’, I.E the reproduction of your copyright (just like the other aforementioned mechanical royalties). Depending on the broadcaster or production company using the music will result in the amount of MCPS you get, sticking with the Hollyoaks example; as I write this it’s currently around £140 per thirty seconds of music they use.

The amount of PPL income you’ll receive is tougher to estimate as their figures aren’t public like they are with the PRS & MCPS, but it’s similar to what you’d get from the MCPS.

As the TV stations and broadcasters of the UK have access to millions of songs they can use for the same price it is essential to really concentrate on approaching the right people in order to best help your chances of landing a sync. It’s pointless trying to get your track on a show which only focuses on using music which is riding high in the charts if you’re an emerging artist, so you’re best off pitching to shows who actively promote new music. Made In Chelsea is a great example that; regardless of what you think of the quality of the show itself, there is no denying the soundtrack is genuinely brilliant. This is proven by the fact it’s the most Shazzamed programme in the UK so getting your music on that will always bring in new fans who won’t have heard your tunes before. Here at Sentric, we’ve averaged about two of our artists per episode on Made In Chelsea for the past four seasons, and yet me and Binky are still no closer to being mates. Criminal.

There are a few types of usages which aren’t covered by these ‘blanket licenses’ between broadcasters and the collection societies. These include…

 If they want to use your track over the opening credits of the show then they must pay an upfront fee.

 If they want to use your music over the end credits then they need to cough up more cash.

 If the scene they want to use your music on features sex, drugs, violence (all the fun stuff) etc. then they need to get permission first as to not upset the songwriter of the track in question.

As with the first slide about sync, for a track to be used on a TV show in America they have to license the song up front, clearing both the master and publishing copyrights with a license fee.

A music supervisor for a US TV show will get a set budget for music, say $100k for 100 tracks to be spread out across 10 episodes. They then need to stretch that budget out so it works accordingly, knowing that songs by bigger profile artists will cost more than songs by emerging artists. They might spend $50k of their budget on a single track for the key closing scene of the whole series, which means they then have $50k left for ninety-nine other tracks. This is where you as an emerging artist can make yourself really attractive to them by being a) cheaper than a chart-topper and b) easy to license, so this is where making your music the aforementioned ‘One Stop’ can significantly increase your chances of landing a sync.

Another thing to consider when licensing to a US TV show is the performance royalties that are generated every time the show is broadcast. If you land a track on a huge show like Grey’s Anatomy then that episode will then be aired in hundreds of territories around the world, generating a performance royalty each time it is broadcast. Therefore, if you can get on the show by only charging $1k up front, but knowing you might get $5k or more from the subsequent performance royalties it’s often a clever and savvy deal to do.

And to bring it back to the beginning of this rather lengthy post; each one of those territories the show is broadcast in will have their own PRO, therefore having a publisher who registers your copyrights in many PROs around the world as possible will mean you get paid quicker. Yet another reason why you should use Sentric. Lovely.

Now you know how sync works, why not read this post on 

So there you go! Those, my friends who are still with us, are the basics of music publishing. It’s long, it’s dry, it’s complicated, it’s confusing and it’s why Sentric Music exists.

Sync

Landing a sync placement on Love Island allows you to reach a wide audience, generating new listeners which could ultimately turn into new fans and have a significant impact on your music royalties and career overall.

We tend to pitch for the show between May (pre show) all the way through the season up until the end of July. Our clients favour new released tracks so the more contemporary the better. If you are a Love Island fan, then you will know the generic timeline of the series as islanders are challenged, meeting each other’s families and going on extremely romantic dates. All these key milestones of the series require lyrically and tonely relevant tracks. I am not saying go and write a song called ‘Casa Amor’ about deception and tests but if any of your tracks incorporate heartbreak, forgiveness and saying goodbye this might just work in your favour. There will be plenty of moments of love, togetherness, summer memories and new found friends throughout the entire series so we are basically looking for thematically fitting tracks!

It may sound pretty obvious but ensuring you know the other people who share rights on the track, their contact details and their publishing entities. For clearing any sync (from TV placements to a feature in a film) this information can be vital with quick turnarounds. Therefore, it is necessary to know both master and publishing details to ensure music supervisors will be able to contact the correct people for any information they require. For example, if a writer is currently unpublished or hasn’t registered their share, having details to hand can massively help speed up the process. Which leads us on perfectly to the next tip.

In order to get your music synced on UK TV, you need to make sure your music is correctly registered with PRS and MCPS 

Sentric do this for you automatically when you register

 which covers your publishing copyrights and also with PPL 

e also have a Neighbouring Rights team to help with this

 covering your master copyright. It is important that every writer on the track is published or has registered their share of the copyright properly with PRS/MCPS otherwise it goes into something called ‘Copyright Control’ that no precise ownership has been registered. Whilst in ‘Copyright Control’ no TV programme or broadcaster will ever use that song. Even if it’s just 1% of the song! This process can be very time consuming and could mean opportunities to get your tracks placed on the show could be missed, if you want to ensure you have the best chance of getting a track featured then this is a great tip. 

When recording a new track you should be creating an instrumental version at the same time. Be sure to agree this with the studio/engineer at the beginning of your session as they might charge you a little bit extra. This is very important because often throughout the show when tracks are used – for example around the ‘firepit’ – there will be voice overs as the islanders talk and reveal who they would like to re-couple with. Therefore, we always like to provide our clients with instrumental versions of the tracks so they can use them during these tense and iconic scenes. 

Love Island is the UK’s most Shazamed soundtrack! We have seen our featured tracks stay in the Top 5 in the Shazam Charts 

 after the episode was aired. In order to ensure your tracks are on Shazam you will need a music distributor. You can then link streaming platforms whereby people can go and stream the track with the click of a button and boost your streaming figures. Artists can also access insights that allow them to see some information and figures about who Shazamed their track which can be beneficial for artists. 

Love Island Sync Placement & Advice

You’ll also be glad to hear that mechanical royalties are generated when your music is streamed. Basically, if you’re getting decent streaming numbers across any of the big platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Prime etc) then being on top of your digital publishing income is key, because if you don’t collect it efficiently and properly then you could be missing out on rather good money.

For the ease of understanding, throughout this section we’re going to assume that 1,000,000 streams on Spotify generates a total of £5,000 in royalties, which is approximately right at the time of writing this (taken as an average of the years of distributions we’ve had at Sentric). There are obviously loads of ‘what ifs and maybes’ here including the territory it was streamed in, if the streams came from free or premium accounts and other voodoo and witchcraft that’s forever to be kept hidden thanks to NDAs.

You would generally expect around 80% of the income generated to go to the master rights owner to be distributed to you by your record label or digital distributor. I’m not going to go into the reason why the master rights gets so much more than the publishing rights here as it’s a bit of a minefield, but it’s essentially a hangover from the music industry’s previous practices where, in theory, the record labels had a much bigger overhead in breaking artists than publishers did.

I say ‘usually’ because of another wonderful quirk of the music publishing industry. Depending on the territory those streams happened and the local PRO, they might be split 65/35 rather than 50/50. BUT, as this is all about simplifying things let’s stick with the 50/50 split because that’s what PROs in the UK, US and Canada do.

10 x £50 – Publishing Digital Performance Income

10 x £50 – Publishing Digital Mechanical Income

So now we’re essentially talking about a micropayment (a stream) broken down into a further micropayment (20% for the publishing income) which is then split in half (one for performance, one for mechanical) and then that’s split into ten further micropayments (as it’s spread across ten different territories).

AMRA directly licenses our songwriters’ digital mechanical rights, (and in some territories, the performance rights as well), to all the major online stores in well over 100 territories worldwide (excluding the US where Sentric collects directly via the local societies including ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and Harry Fox) Therefore that means Sentric now collects that income like so:

1 x £500 – Publishing Digital Mechanical Income via AMRA.

Now, the great thing here is that the income we receive from the PROs and from AMRA should match up with it being a 50/50 split. So say if from AMRA we receive £50 in digital mechanical royalties from your music being streamed in the UK, but we only receive £36 in digital performance royalties from the PRS, it allows us to go to the PRS and say; “Oi, now then, you clearly have underpaid our songwriter £14 and we have the data from AMRA to prove it”.

Simply put, since we started collecting digital royalties via this model, we’ve seen a 

400% increase in digital publishing royalties paid out to our artists in just three years.

Publishing Royalties From Streaming 

Now onto mechanical royalties which in the UK are collected and administered by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS).

Essentially, an MCPS royalty is generated every time your music is reproduced and that’s across all formats, including downloads and streaming.

For example, if a record label wanted to release your record and pressed a thousand CDs and a hundred vinyl, they’d need to pay a license fee for each generated in order to do so, which would go to the songwriters (and their publishers) of the respective songs on said LP.

As an emerging artist, your mechanical income will be notably less than your performance income at the start of your career, but when you start shifting units it’ll become a very noteworthy source of income indeed so it’s best to ensure you’re on top of it from the beginning and have your copyrights registered with the MCPS (which is yet another thing we do for you at Sentric – we’re a busy bunch).

Let’s take a look at the income flow for a mechanical royalty generated from a physical CD sale:

WTF IS MUSIC PUBLISHING

Let’s break it down

WTF is Music Publishing? A Beginners Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

What are performance royalties?

What are mechanical royalties?

PRO Vs Publisher

Song Registration: Step by Step Guide

Live Performance Registration: Step by Step Guide

Everybody needs good neighbour(ing rights)

Royalties

Income $treams – How We Collect Your Digital Publishing Income

Top Tips For Funding Applications

Why Sentric Music and the PRS are two different things

Sync

Sync

Sync

Love Island Sync Placement & Advice

Royalties

Publishing Royalties From Streaming

Royalties

Mechanical Royalties

Royalties

Performance Royalties

Life Cycle of Copyright: Introduction

Collection

PROs & Collection Societies

WTF is Music Publishing? A Beginners Guide

We put you in control of your music with music publishing built around you.