Royalty Guide · 4 min read
Why publishing money goes unclaimed
Unclaimed royalties are almost never a mystery. They are a paperwork failure with three or four common causes.
Societies hold money they cannot pay out because the work record does not exist, the writer's identity is ambiguous, or the shares submitted by different parties disagree. In each case the money is held rather than distributed, and after a period it may be redistributed to other rightsholders by market share.
The most common cause is simply that no registration was ever filed. The second most common is a partial registration: one writer's publisher registers their share and the co-writers are left as unidentified. The third is a split conflict — two claims on the same song that add up to more than the whole.
None of these is exotic, and all of them are avoidable with accurate writer details, an IPI number for each writer, and splits that total exactly one hundred percent.
What to remember
- Unregistered songs earn money that is never matched to anyone.
- Partial registrations leave co-writers unpaid.
- Splits that do not total 100% stall the whole song.