Understand how distributors, streaming services, social platforms, content identification systems, and other digital services affect music licensing, monetization, and royalty collection.

Outcome. Understand what your distributor and the platforms are collecting on your behalf, and what they are not.

Your distributor sits between you and the platforms and handles delivery, identifiers and some royalty flows. What it collects, and what it leaves for you to claim elsewhere, differs by company and is stated in the agreement rather than on the marketing page.

Content identification systems on video platforms match uploads against a reference recording and generate revenue from other people’s videos that use your music. That only works if your recordings are registered in the system.

Social platforms license catalogs centrally, which is why a fan video does not need your permission but does need your work to be identified correctly for you to see anything from it.

Metadata is the thread running through all of it. Titles, credits, writers, splits and identifiers decide whether platform money is matched to you or sits unallocated, and the fix is always upstream of the payment.

What you will produce

A written map of every platform and intermediary in your chain, naming what each one collects, what it does not, and where the gaps are covered.