Fingerprint formed from sound wave lines, representing proof of song ownership

The Music Question That Never Changes: What Getting Licensing Wrong Actually Costs You

Trust Me Isn’t a Defense:

Trust Me Isn't a Defense: Why Publishing Administration Matters for Independent Artists

On September 15th, 2026, Universal Music Group sued DistroKid in federal court in Delaware. The complaint makes two main accusations. First, that DistroKid passes off mass-produced AI tracks as releases from real human artists. Second, that when a platforms/ rights system flag one of its tracks as a copy of a Universal recording, DistroKid would often give up its claim on that platform but keep delivering the same recording everywhere else.

DistroKid has long positioned itself as a pipeline. Its Terms of Service describe DistroKid as a passive conduit, make the uploader solely responsible for what they upload, and require them to certify they have the rights. DistroKid reserves the right to remove content at its discretion.

If you ever follow copyright news, you might wonder, as I did, how is this case even possible. In March 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Cox Communications v. Sony Music that an internet provider isn’t liable for its users’ infringement just because it knows about it and kept providing service. But here, UMG’s complaint is a bit different. It argues DistroKid isn’t an innocent bystander. It is an active participant in the delivery of the music itself, decides what gets distributed, and profits from each and every upload. Whether that is going to hold up is what the courts will have to decide.

So where does that leave the independent artist? If the distributor puts the responsibility on the uploader, then it becomes your job to prove you own your music.

When the industry chooses to go after undisclosed AI-generated music, that’s the right move. So the UMG/ DistroKid lawsuit isn’t about AI music that is disclosed as AI. It’s about music pretending to be something it isn’t.

But there is one section in the complaint that jumped right out at me.

“Artists and creative enterprises may use AI as one of many tools in creating, producing, or releasing music and Plaintiffs are not challenging those uses. Plaintiffs use the term “artist-backed release” in this Complaint to mean a release where the artist and distributor are accountable for the accuracy of the metadata and stand behind the ownership and human creativity in the release—as distinguished from “mass-generated” or deceptive releases by content farms or bad actors.”

One of the largest music companies in the world is defining legitimacy, in part, by the data.

Meanwhile, independent artists are telling their stories of human-made songs being pulled down. Being flagged at AI. Or flagged for fraudulent streaming behaviors. Many artists say they don’t get a chance to dispute.

When that happens, what does a human artist have to show for themselves? For a lot of indie artists, their honest answer is their word. “I made this. Trust me.”

Trust me is not a defense. The documentation is.

I wrote about this idea in a short LindkedIn article. Here, this is a deeper dive into this topic. Where I want to talk about what publishing administration is, what it costs, where the money goes when nobody is doing the job, and the one registration that protects everything else.

What is Publishing Administration?

Every song has two copyrights. The sound recording, also called the master, that is the actual recording itself. And the composition that it the song: the melody, the lyrics, the structure underneath any recording of it.

Publishing administration is the business of managing the composition. Registering it. Collecting what it earns. Making sure every society, collective, and database in the world knows who wrote it and who gets paid.

Here’s a common misstep artists often miss. A publishing administrator is not the same as a traditional music publisher.

In a traditional publishing deal, you will typically sign away a share of ownership of your songs. In an administration deal, you keep 100% of your copyright. The administrator is working for you, to collect for you, and takes a fee for doing the job. Your songs stay with you.

If You Wrote it, You Are the Publisher

I’ve heard independent artists say they don’t have a publishing company. They’ve never set that up. So, they assume there is nothing there.

But that’s not how it works.

As soon as you write that song, you own the composition. The writer’s side and the publisher’s side. If you’ve already signed a publishing deal, or you wrote the song as a work-for-hire, those agreements decide who owns what. If you haven’t, it’s yours. But this also means that somebody needs to manage it.

The work now exists. The registrations still need to happen. There can be money being earned somewhere in the world. If nobody does the job, the money doesn’t disappear. The money just doesn’t find you.

What it Costs, and Why That’s the Wrong Question

The first question everyone asks is a fair one: what is this going to cost me?

With our company PrimalHouse Music, our administration fee is 15% of what we collect.

Here’s how that works. We collect 100% of the publishing revenue a song earns, because that’s what you want the administrator to do. We retain 15% and then pay the remaining 85%.

Looking at this on paper, it looks like an artist is paying 15%. But here’s the thing, that’s not the right way to look at it.

You can of course keep 100% of what you’re collecting on your own. Or you can receive 85% of what your song is actually earning around the world. For many indie artists, especially when it comes to mechanical royalties and income from other countries, what they’re collecting on their own is probably close to nothing.

It’s also important to understand what the fee touches and what it doesn’t.

Performance royalties come in two parts. I like to think of it as two halves. When the song is performed on radio, TV, streaming, or in public, your performing rights organization (PRO) splits the royalty into a writer’s share and a publisher’s share. The writer’s share goes straight from your PRO to you. The administrator never touches that. The administrator collects the publisher’s share, keeps it’s agreed upon percentage (15%), and pays you (85%).

Mechanical royalties work a bit different. They aren’t split into a writer’s share and a publisher’s share. In the United States, streaming mechanicals are collected by The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), which pays them to whoever controls the publishing; a publisher, an administrator, or a songwriter who administers their own songs. Writers are then paid by their publisher; under whatever agreement they have.

If you’re self-published, you are the publisher, so there’s no one in between. Your administrator collects your mechanicals, keeps 15%, and pays you 85%.

If you co-wrote the song, each writer’s share is normally registered and collected separately. Your administrator collects only your share, and your co-writer collects theirs. If your co-writer’s share comes through you instead, paying them is between the two of you, under your co-writing agreement. Your administrator works for you, not for them.

The master is never touched. Publishing administration has nothing to do with the sound recording income. But your recording and PROs composer share will still benefit here, because a registration isn’t complete until the recording and the composition are all properly linked.

Here is a simple example:

Royalty	Earned	Who collects	You receive
Performance, writer's share	$100	Your PRO, directly to you	$100
Performance, publisher's share	$100	Administrator	$85
Mechanicals	$100	Administrator	$85
Total	$300		$270

The administrator’s job is to make sure every one of those lines is actually collected, everywhere your song is earned.

The Numbers Behind Your Song: ISRC, ISWC, and IPI

Most artists have seen these letters. However, fewer know what each one actually does.

ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) identifies a specific recording. It’s usually assigned by your label or distributor. More from IFPI.
ISWC (International Standard Musical Work Code) identifies the composition, the song itself. It’s typically assigned when the song is registered with a PRO, through the International ISWC system run by CISAC. More from the ISWC International Agency.
IPI (Interested Party Information) identifies the writers and publishers who own the composition, in every society around the world. You get an IPI number when you join a PRO as a writer, and your publishing company gets its own when it joins as a publisher.

The system can’t tell who you are. It only ready your codes. If someone else’s codes look like yours, your money stops. That’s why a big part of an administrator’s job is making sure your recording, your composition, and your ownership are connected correctly in every database that matters.

That starts with the codes themselves. PrimalHouse has its own set of ISRC registrant code, so if your recordings don’t have ISRCs yet, we can assign them. You’re your masters stay yours. We just make sure they’re identified correctly from the start.

Distributors and streaming services live in the ISRC world. The proof of who wrote the song lives on the publisher side. When those two don’t connect cleanly, problems start. Money goes unmatched. And credits go missing.

Looking back at the UMG/DistroKid complaint, it shows how serious this can get. It describes “ISRC theft,” where a track was uploaded using the same ISRC as someone else’s legitimate recording. One example, a DistroKid-distributed track titled “Juice Newton” carried the same ISRC as Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning.” The UMG complaint says the conflicting claims froze all revenue for the legitimate recording on that service.

The system can’t tell who you are. It only reads your codes. If someone else’s codes look like yours, your money stops. That’s why a big part of an administrator’s job is making sure your recording, your composition, and your ownership are connected correctly in every database that matters.

Where Your Money Sits When Nobody Claims It

When a song earns royalties but the data doesn’t match a registered owner, that money goes into what the industry calls the black box. It’s unmatched, unclaimed income. Earned, but not paid.

You may also see this called ‘suspense.” Suspense is money being held while a problem gets resolved, like a missing registration or a conflicting claim. The black box is where it ends up if nobody resolves it.

In the United States, The MLC inherited about $424 million (later revised to about $397 million) in historical unmatched streaming royalties from the digital services, under the Music Modernization Act, when it launched in 2021. It has been collecting new royalties every month since. It reports a match rate above 92%. Most money eventually finds its owner, if the owner’s data is there to be found.

The rest doesn’t stay in the box forever. Starting in April 2027, the MLC plans to begin market share distributions of whatever remains unmatched, one month at a time, starting with royalties from January 2021. The older, pre-2021 money will be handled after that.

Here’s how that works. It is not a dollar per song. The leftover money is split in proportion to what each matched song earned that month, on each service.

Let’s say there’s $100,000 left over for one service in one month, and all the matched songs on that service earned $10 million that month. Every matched song gets an extra 1% of what it already earned.

Song	Earned that month	Share of the leftover
Your song, registered	$50	$0.50
A classic rock hit	$5,000	$50
An unregistered song	Unmatched	$0

The biggest songs get the biggest share, because they earned the most. The unregistered song gets nothing. And the money that unregistered song earned is part of the pool being split among everyone else.

As you can now see, the artist who doesn’t register is helping fund everyone who did.

But this isn’t only a U.S. issue. Collection societies around the world have their own rules for unmatched money, and many have historically distributed it based on market share. In 2021, the UK Parliament’s culture committee called for an end to that practice and recommended that collecting societies reinvest unattributed royalties into the industry instead. The government declined. In 2026, the UK’s Court of Appeal rejected a songwriter-led challenge to how PRS distributes its black box, finding its approach was fair when the data was limited.

The market share split is the consolation prize. The real money is your own royalties, matched to your song before they ever reach the black box. That’s the job.

Music Publishing is Hard

I’ve been in the business for three decades, well before we started PrimalHouse Music four years ago. Between our own copyrights and the ones we administer, we’ve worked with PROs and administrative partners all over the world.

Getting our deals and delivery of our data put into place, I can’t say at any point, “That was a cakewalk.” Not once.

Not because we don’t know what we’re doing. I’m going to say, “we do.” It’s because the work is hard.

I once had a conversation with someone in Business Affairs at a large publishing company. He summed up the whole industry in four words.

“Music publishing is hard.”

Why was he right? It’s hard because every “i” must be dotted and every “t” must be crossed, in every data system, as your metadata travels the world. One wrong split. One misspelled name. One missing number. The system can’t pay you. It doesn’t lose the money. It just can’t find you.

Metadata is the rhythm section of your song. Nobody is applauding it. But without it, everything quickly falls apart.

If you’re an independent artist who can handle your own publishing administration, that’s great. Do it. You can even register directly with The MLC as a self-administered songwriter. But someone has to do the job. Now more than ever, with this many moving parts, a great song is only as great as the data it’s scored on.

The Registration That Doesn’t Pay You but Protects Everything

There’s one registration that won’t earn you a single royalty. However, it may be the most important one you ever make.

Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Here is why that matters.

Your authorship is put onto the federal record. When you register, you certify that you wrote the work. Since 2023, the Copyright Office has also required applicants to disclose AI-generated material and leave it out of the claim. Register before publication, or withing five years of it, and your registration counts as legal proof that you created the work and that your copyright is valid. If ever challenged, the burden falls to whoever wants to challenge, by other evidence.

It decides whether you can sue, and what you can win. For works created in the United States, you can’t file a copyright infringement lawsuit until the work is registered. The Supreme Court confirmed this in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com in 2019.

The timing decides what you can recover. If you work was registered before the infringement began, or withing three months of first publication, you may be eligible for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, plus attorney’s fees. Register late, and for an infringement that started before you registered, you are limited to actual damages. For an independent song, those are usually small and can be hard to prove.

The first question that comes up in any deal, when you are bringing in an investor or you are selling your catalog, is almost always the same: Are your works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office? An attorney conducting their due diligence is always going to want to know.

A publishing administrator can help here too. Registering on time is exactly the kind of work that slips when nobody is owning it.

So What Would You Hand Them?

Most are going to think of publishing administration as the paperwork that gets you paid. Yes, it is. But it’s now becoming something even more. It is how you prove that the work is yours.

The question is not “Do I need a publishing administrator?”

The question is “If someone asked me tomorrow to prove I wrote this, what would I hand them?”

Because “Trust Me” isn’t a defense.

If you'd like to talk about your catalog, contact Ryan Neill PrimalHouse Media Group_Publishing Administration.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a publishing administrator do? A publishing administrator registers your compositions with performing rights organizations, mechanical collectives, and collection societies worldwide, links your recordings to your songs, collects the royalties your songs earn, and pays you your share.

Do I keep my copyright with publishing administration? Yes. Unlike a traditional publishing deal, an administration deal lets you keep 100% ownership of your songs. The administrator collects and manages on your behalf for a fee.

How much does publishing administration cost? Administrators charge a percentage of what they collect. At PrimalHouse, the fee is 15%. The fee applies only to publishing income the administrator collects, never to your writer's share of performance royalties or your master recording income.

Do I have publishing if I don't have a publishing company? Yes. If you wrote the song and haven't signed it to a publisher, you own the publishing. Not having a company doesn't make the publishing go away. It means nobody is collecting it.

What is the music royalty black box? The black box is money that has been earned but can't be matched to a registered owner because of missing or incorrect data. If it stays unmatched long enough, it may be distributed to other rights holders.

Do I need to register my songs with the U.S. Copyright Office? Registration isn't required to own a copyright. But for songs created in the U.S., you have to register before you can file an infringement lawsuit. If you register after the infringement has started, you can still sue, but only for your actual damages and the infringer’s profits. Register before the infringement begins, or within three months of release, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work an attorney’s fees become available. It's also one of the first things investors and buyers check.