Streaming royalties on mainstream services are generally paid out through multiple channels: firstly, a revenue share from the platform itself - a self-releasing artists might receive this through an aggregator / distributor, eg Distrokid - and additionally a payment via Collecting Societies for the mechanical and performance royalties, based on reported metadata. In the UK for example, these are paid by a number of collection societies that perform slightly different roles - PRS, MCPS and PPL. There are many equivalents to these in different territories and countries worldwide.

This system is important to ensuring songwriters and performers are paid for their work. It’s not without its issues though, with billions of potential royalties going unpaid. We are open to managing payments through these societies in future - and as ever, will take the community’s lead in that process - but it would require funding of cross-territory licences to do so, and there are good reasons to encourage teams to manage their payments fully on-platform, which we’ll get on to below.

So to be clear, it is fine to upload music registered with collection societies to Patrontape, we just ask at this stage uploaders are willing and agree to make an exemption to Collecting Society royalties and keep all payouts on-platform. If you’ve ever uploaded to Bandcamp, then you’ve done the same according to their terms, allowing them to provide on-demand streaming without reporting to societies.

In their case, this is on the basis that those streams form part of a storefront pitch for downloads and merch. But in our case, it enables us to ensure that artists and their teams are paid precisely the share of each subscription which they’ve earned - we track listens to the second, not by number of streams (which is the traditional route, where usually anything over 30 seconds constitutes a stream), and each subscription on Patrontape has a potentially different per-second value based on the amount the listener has pledged and the total seconds being divided up. Through a Collecting Society, we would not be able to achieve this level of control, and ultimately, fairness.

Fair payments are at the core of what we’re trying to do, and we believe in the system we’ve built to provide those payments. Our system also means that artists who aren’t able to pay the membership fees of collecting societies, or have issues with metadata, aren’t missing out on payments. Equally, we appreciate that creative teams may have detailed split arrangements which would incur extra work to get those parties onboarded to Patrontape for payments. We do think it’s worth it, but are always open to a discussion on how we can reach the best solution for all. Drop us an email or hop on the discord to discuss.