What I Often Find When I Audit an Artist’s Publishing Registrations
The last time I sat down to audit a new client’s publishing registrations, they were completely convinced everything was in order. PRS member, ticked. Distributor handling their releases, ticked. “My publishing is sorted,” they said. And genuinely, they believed it.
What I found was a catalogue of around forty works, a decent chunk of which had either incomplete registrations or none at all. Several tracks that had been placed on sync compilations years earlier. Co-writer splits that existed in conversations but had never been formally registered anywhere. An ISWC on one of their most streamed tracks that didn’t match the one logged with the sub-publisher in Germany.
None of this should be considered unusual. Actually, it is one of the most common things I find when I start going through an artist’s publishing from scratch. The assumption that being a PRS member and having a distributor means your publishing is actively administered is understandable. Unfortunately, it’s very often just wrong.
PRS membership means you can collect. It doesn’t mean anyone is actively making sure your works are registered correctly, tracked internationally, or that the royalties due to you are finding their way back to you. The onus is on you as an individual to make sure all the I’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, not the PRO/CMO.
About the Author
Ron Pye spent years in senior IT roles at Channel 4, Channel 5, and the BBC before returning to music full time. He now runs IQ Artist Management, a UK-based practice working with independent artists on catalogue management, music publishing, royalty collection, sync licensing, and career development. He holds an MA in Music Industry Studies with Distinction from the University of Liverpool, where his research focused on the relationship between technology, law, and the music industry. He also holds a BA in Music Business and Finance.
Publishing rights and royalty administration sit at the centre of much of his day-to-day work. They come up in management agreements, in conversations with artists at every career stage, and in the practical work of going through a catalogue and finding out what is actually registered, where, and whether it is earning what it should be. The gap between what an artist assumes is in order and what is actually in order tends to be where most of those conversations start.
He has worked through that gap across catalogues of many different sizes and at many different career stages. The problems he finds are rarely unique to one artist. They follow patterns, and knowing those patterns is what makes it possible to move through a catalogue efficiently and find what needs fixing.
If you are an artist trying to get a clear picture of whether your publishing income is working as hard as it should be, his perspective comes from the practical side of that question rather than the theoretical one.
What Publishing Administration Actually Covers
There’s a version of publishing administration that gets explained in music industry guides, and it goes something like this: a publisher or admin company registers your works, collects your royalties, and takes a percentage for the service. Most of that is quite accurate. What those guides tend to skip over is the distinction between what you own and what actually gets collected.
You own your copyright from the moment you write something. That has been true since the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and in the UK, it doesn’t require you to register anything officially. But ownership and collection are two very different things. When revenues are generated, the money sits in various collection pots across the world, and it only moves to you if someone has told those organisations who you are, where you are, what you wrote, and who the other writers on the track are.
In the UK, that means PRS for Music and MCPS. Both now operate under the same organisation, but they cover different royalty types. PRS handles performing rights, the royalties generated when your music is played publicly, broadcast, or streamed. MCPS covers mechanical rights, the royalties due each time your music is physically or digitally reproduced. Separate income streams, separate registration requirements, and a surprising number of artists are only signed up for one or the other of them.
Then there is PPL, which many people confuse with PRS. PPL collects neighbouring rights on behalf of performers and record labels, not songwriters. So, if you wrote and recorded the track yourself, you could have money sitting with both PRS and PPL under different memberships.
This structure has long confused many, and so, this is where publishing administrators come into the equation. A publishing administrator takes a fee, typically somewhere between 15% and 20%, to manage your registrations across all of these organisations and their international equivalents. Of which there are many. The ‘value’ they are bringing to your table is the coverage. Register once and you’re registered all over the globe. Try doing all of the administration yourself and there is a real chance that royalties generated in other territories may never make it back to you at all.
The Gaps I Find Most Often
So let’s get into the specifics, because this is where most articles on publishing administration I’ve read become quite vague. The gaps I have found are not random. They follow patterns, and once you’ve done a few of these audits you start to recognise them.
Co-writer splits are where I often find the most problems. This is where an artist has written a track with a producer, or a collaborator contributed a verse, and everyone agrees verbally on who owns what. Then, nobody registers those splits sheets formally with PRS, because everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job.
Years go by. The track starts to get some traction, maybe picked up for a sync placement or a playlist, and when the royalties eventually start to flow, they go entirely to whichever party did register correctly, or, they sit in a holding account waiting for someone to claim them. I’ve seen splits that both parties agreed in writing by email never make it into a PRS works registration. The informal agreement means nothing to the collection society who are not privy to the contents of your emails.
ISWC mismatches are more technical but equally just as costly. An ISWC (International Standard Work Code) identifies the composition itself, this is separate from the ISRC which identifies a specific recording. When the ISWC on a PRS registration doesn’t match what a sub-publisher in another territory has on record, the international collection chain can break down. The work still exists in both systems. But, the payment doesn’t arrive.
Mechanical rights are the area where I see the most money sitting uncollected. MCPS registration is separate from PRS registration, and a lot of artists who joined PRS years ago never went back to register their works for mechanical collection. Any track that lands on a sync compilation, goes out on vinyl, or gets distributed digitally should in theory generate mechanical royalties. If the artist never registered the work with MCPS, those royalties go unclaimed. I had a client with twelve tracks on various sync compilation releases over three years. None of them were registered for mechanicals. That’s money that had already passed the collection window and so was not recoupable.
Old catalogue is the final category. Anything released before an artist joined PRS, or registered under incorrect metadata, sits effectively invisible. Wrong ISRCs, misspelled titles, a name used at the time that the artist has since changed. Collection societies can only pay out on what they can match. If the metadata doesn’t align, the match doesn’t happen and you don’t get paid.
Why This Keeps Happening
The short answer is that nobody tells you. There doesn’t appear to be any infrastructure in place to catch such things and highlight them to the relevant parties. PRS membership comes with access to their works registration portal, which is simple enough to use. Log in, register your tracks, add your co-writers, submit. PRS built it as self-service, and for a single artist releasing a few tracks a year, it mostly works. What it doesn’t do is flag the things you haven’t done, prompt you to register with MCPS as well, or mention that your PRS registration covers your writer share but leaves the publisher share unclaimed unless you’ve also set up as a publisher member.
That distinction matters more than most people realise. On every work you register with PRS, two shares exist. The writer share goes to the songwriter. The publisher share goes to whoever published the work. If you release independently and haven’t registered as a publisher, that publisher share doesn’t disappear. It goes into a general distribution pot. You are effectively leaving half of your royalties on the table without knowing it.
Distributors also add to the confusion. Most artists assume their distributor will handle the publishing because they handle everything else. They don’t, with very few exceptions. A distributor collects neighbouring rights through PPL on the recording side, but publishing collection through PRS and MCPS is entirely separate and requires separate registration. Nobody explains this clearly when you sign up.
Then there’s the international picture, which is where most independent artists simply have no visibility at all. PRS has reciprocal agreements with collecting societies in over 100 territories. But those agreements only work to your advantage if your metadata is correct in the first place.
What an Audit Actually Looks Like
The starting point for me is always a full works inventory. That means compiling and listing every track the artist has released. I then check each one against PRS’s works database, and verify the registration is complete. ‘Complete’ means the right ISWC, the correct co-writer splits, the right publisher details, and a status that confirms the work is active and not pending.
From there, the check moves to MCPS. Are the same works registered for mechanical rights? If the artist has released physical product or a sync compilation has used their music, this matters. A PRS registration and an MCPS registration are separate things, even though both sit under PRS for Music.
PPL is next. If the artist performs on their own recordings, they should be a PPL performer member. Many aren’t, particularly if they’ve been releasing for a while without guidance on the setup.
The international piece is harder to audit thoroughly, but you can get a reasonable picture by checking whether works appear in the databases of the major foreign societies. GEMA in Germany is a useful starting point for any artist with European streaming traction. Gaps there usually point to metadata issues at the PRS end.
Unclaimed royalties are worth checking too. PRS holds royalties for a defined period (generally three years) before redistributing them into the general membership pool. If a work was generating income during a period when it wasn’t correctly registered, some of that money may still be recoverable.
The outcome is rarely dramatic. No massive windfalls. What you find is a clearer picture of what the catalogue is actually earning you and what has fallen through the gaps. The peace of mind is knowing this is not going to happen again.
What I’ve Never Found After an Audit
The publishing system is not broken. It does exactly what it was built to do: collect and distribute royalties for works that are correctly registered, with the right metadata, in the right places. The problem is that most independent artists set everything up once, usually when they first joined PRS, and never went back. The system moved on. The catalogue didn’t.
What I find when I do these audits is not evidence of bad faith from the societies. It’s the result of a system that rewards active management and quietly penalises anyone who assumes it runs itself.
Some of the gaps are recoverable. Others aren’t. Sometimes, if the collection window has passed, or the redistribution has already happened, there’s nothing anyone can do but to make sure everything is correctly registered so this cannot happen again. Every catalogue is different, I do keep seeing the same issues time after time.
What I can tell you is that I’ve never done one of these audits and found everything exactly as it should be. Once you know what’s in your catalogue and what’s missing, the question of whether an admin deal makes sense is worth thinking through carefully. You’ll get the best out of any deal if everything is set up and registered correctly from the start.
