These industries pay to use music and their fees pay your royalties. There is no exact dollar figure on what you will make per play, as there are many varying calculations to be made for each performance situation. I'm going to use Radio Play as an overview to help simplify it for you. All industries which license music for use, pay varying licensing fees, some a flat rate, and some by survey.

As most of you know, radio has major market stations and smaller market stations. Within all radio formats there are BDS stations. These are the reporting stations whose airplay is what our "charts" are based on. SOCAN does not base its royalty structure on charts. For tracking airplay on radio, SOCAN surveys a number of stations across the country within all genres. These stations are required to record each and every song they play for one full week. They also track the artists' name, songwriting and publishing information as well as song duration. So, in essence, if your song was getting airplay from any of the surveyed stations you are in luck, if you are registered. Each song receives credits per usage. A single credit is measured against the total number of credits in that pool (Country/AC/POP etc) and divides it into the total dollar amount they have received in licensing for that market, and the total, is the dollar amount per credit. Often times it takes 7 - 10 months to process the data, so if you expect to see a large royalty cheque within the first quarter your song is receiving airplay, you will be disappointed. Calculations are made on a quarterly basis (January - March, April - June, July -Sept and Oct -Dec). If you are in Canada and don't register with SOCAN, you might as well donate all your songs to charity. SOCAN also collects royalties for any performances outside of Canada as well, through their affiliations with other royalty collection agencies.

The whole royalty pie is comprised of 2 halves. One is the writers royalties, the other publishing. If you are self published, you own the whole pie. If you co- wrote the song, you have a 50/50 split. If three folks worked on the creation of the song, its 33.3 % and 4 writers is 25% - with their publishing companies getting half of those figures. I know it's starting to sound complicated but it's not really. Now lets go back to those radio credits. If you wrote the whole song and are self published, you get the full credit. If you co wrote the song you get half the credit.

We often get asked how to break down the co-creation of a song. How much are lyrics worth versus the music? Generally speaking music composition is half the song and lyrics the other half. Most of the credible songwriters we have worked with will never nickle and dime over who contributed more or less to a song. If you are in a room creating a song with someone, then it's a 50 50 split. Even if they only added 1 word. That's how most folks do it. But its not always the case. The least value you can attribute for ownership is 10%. Artists who record your songs, on the other hand do not make any royalties from airplay unless they are powerful enough to be able to negotiate some of your pie.

So, to sum it all up, to broadcast a song on radio, TV or other public performance, the broadcaster pays a fee to SOCAN. SOCAN in turn, monitors and records this airplay and pays you, the copyright owner, royalties for your songs' use. If you don't register your works, you will not receive royalties. Simple as that.

Now… record sales…hmmm that might have to be another article.

For more information on how your songs make money, visit the SOCAN website.