Royalties 101 - Recorded Music

Everything you need to know to get started in Recorded Music Royalties

Welcome to Royalties 101. This course is designed to take you from having little knowledge in reporting royalties for a record label, through to having a strong grasp of all the rights and concepts involved.

Royalties 101 is structured as 11 lessons, plus some multiple choice tests along the way to test the knowledge that you've just gained. Each lesson will take you through an area of the recorded music industry, building up your knowledge of the rights involved and their royalties. At the end of the course, you'll find a glossary for all the music industry related terms.

Lesson 1: What is Copyright

What is copyright? And how does it affect the rights we control in music?

Lesson 2: Flow of Revenues in Recorded Music

See how revenues flow in the recorded music industry.

Lesson 3: How Sales Data Is Shared With Labels

How do labels receive their sales data?

Lesson 4: What A Record Label Deal Looks Like

What does a record label deal look like? What terms are included?

Lesson 5: Profit Share Deals

We take a closer look at Profit Share Deals and how they work.

Lesson 6: Royalty Deals

We've learned about profit share deals, but what is a royalty deal, what does it look like and how does it work?

Lesson 7: Producers

We take a look at producers: where do they sit in the flow of royalties and how do they get paid?

Lesson 8: The Mechanical Liability of Record Labels

In this chapter we explore how mechanical royalties work (outside North America).

Lesson 9: Mechanical Royalties in North America

We focus on mechanical royalties in North America in this chapter, exploring how they work in these particular territories.

Lesson 10: Performance and Neighbouring Rights

What are neighbouring rights, and how do they work? And what does performance have to do with the recorded music industry?

Lesson 11: Introduction to Royalty Accounting Software

Now that we have learned about the recorded music industry and royalties, we take a brief look at royalty accounting software.

Glossary

In this glossary we provide definitions for many of the terms we have come across in the previous articles.