Releasing Your Music

Mechanical vs Performance Royalties: The Two Kinds of Money a Song Can Earn

By Mike · Published August 21, 2026

Mechanical royalties get paid when your song gets reproduced, a copy made, a stream counted as a copy. Performance royalties get paid when your song gets performed publicly, played on radio, played live, played in a movie. Both are money owed to you as a songwriter, and they’re separate from the streaming royalty your recording earns.

This is one of those things that every self-released musician eventually gets confused by, usually well after they’ve already released something and left money sitting somewhere they didn’t know to look. It’s worth actually understanding, because the amounts aren’t trivial and almost none of it happens automatically.

The split that trips everyone up: song vs recording

Start here, because it’s the root of the confusion. A song, meaning the composition, the melody and lyrics, is a different piece of intellectual property from the recording of that song, the actual audio file. If you write and record your own material, you own both, but they earn money through completely different channels.

The master recording royalty is what most DIY musicians already know about, it’s the money that comes from your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, whoever) when your recording gets streamed or sold. That’s covered in more detail in streaming royalties math if you want the fuller breakdown of that pool.

Mechanical and performance royalties are the composition side. They’re owed to you as the songwriter and publisher, on top of whatever your recording earns. If you wrote your own songs and released them yourself, you are, in theory, owed both the master royalty and the composition royalties. Most DIY artists only ever collect the first one, because nobody told them the second one exists or how to go get it.

Mechanical royalties

Mechanical royalties are paid for reproducing the composition. That used to mean physical copies, vinyl, CDs, and downloads, but it now also covers streams, since a stream legally counts as a reproduction of the song. In the US, these are collected through the MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which was set up after the 2018 Music Modernization Act specifically to handle streaming mechanicals for songwriters. If you’re self-published, meaning you didn’t sign your songs to an actual publishing company, you need to register directly with the MLC yourself to collect this. Nobody does it for you by default.

Performance royalties

Performance royalties are paid when the composition gets performed publicly. Radio play, a bar band covering your song live, a sync placement in a show or a commercial, and yes, streaming also generates a performance royalty component alongside the mechanical one. In the US these are collected through PROs, Performing Rights Organizations, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC being the main three. You pick one, join as a songwriter (this side is free), and register your songs with them. The PRO takes a small administrative cut out of what it collects on your behalf, which is standard and fine, that’s how the system funds itself.

Why this actually matters for a totally DIY release

If you wrote, recorded, and self-released a song with no label and no publisher involved, it’s tempting to think there’s just one royalty stream to worry about, whatever your distributor sends you. That’s not accurate. You’re also owed mechanical royalties through the MLC and performance royalties through a PRO, and neither of those shows up automatically just because you uploaded a song to Spotify. You have to register for both, separately, yourself. A lot of working musicians never do, and it’s real money that sits uncollected, sometimes for years, sometimes permanently once it ages out.

Registering with a PRO takes maybe twenty minutes. Confirming your MLC registration is similarly straightforward once you know it exists. Neither costs anything meaningful to set up. The only real cost is the small percentage each organization holds back for administering the collection, which is standard practice and not something to be suspicious of.

If you’d rather not manage the MLC and PRO registration yourself, some distributors offer optional publishing administration as an add-on, for a fee, where they handle collecting these royalties on your behalf in exchange for a cut. TuneCore is one of the more prominent ones that does this, and how that option stacks up against the free do-it-yourself route is covered in DistroKid vs TuneCore.

One more thing worth doing alongside all this: if you wrote the song with anyone else, none of these registrations mean much if your splits aren’t documented and agreed on first. That’s a separate topic, covered in how song splits work, but it’s the piece that has to be settled before any of these royalty streams get divided correctly.