Three other organizations owe you money for the same songs. None of them pay anything until somebody registers you. For most independent artists, nobody has.
Send me one statement →You get a 3-minute video back. No call. No pitch.
If there's nothing worth fixing, I'll say so.
The thing nobody explains
Every piece of music is two things at once — the recording and the song. A single stream owes money on both, and those payments go to different places.
The recording. TuneCore, DistroKid, CD Baby. This is the statement you already see.
Mechanical royalties on the song. Spotify pays the MLC directly. It never touches your distributor.
Performance royalties on the song. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. Being a member is not the same as registering each song.
Digital radio — Pandora, SiriusXM. Paid straight to the performer, not through a label or distributor. Unclaimed money expires after three years.
What actually happens
Two halves. The first I do on my own before we talk. The second we do together, on a screen share, in about twenty minutes.
You do these four yourself with me on screen. Your logins stay yours — and those databases don't permit a third party to look them up and resell the answer.
A real teardown
Four findings from one real distributor export, redacted. None of these are visible by reading the statement normally — and none of them are guesses about what you're owed. They're facts about what the document does and doesn't say.
The session
Where every dollar came from, which platforms actually pay you, and where your listeners really are. Most people have never had this explained to them once.
Missing months, platforms that never paid, and exactly how many streams each track needs to start earning. I'll also tell you plainly what's fine, because usually most of it is.
MLC, PRO, SoundExchange. You type your own credentials, I walk you through every field. All three are free to join.
Before you ask
You never give me a password. At the MLC you add me as a Copyright User on your own account and remove me whenever you like. Everywhere else you type your own credentials while I talk you through the fields.
The money never passes through me. Every royalty is paid directly to you by the MLC, your PRO and SoundExchange. I never hold it, route it, or take a percentage of it. There's no mechanism for me to skim anything, because I'm never in the middle.
Your statement is deleted after 30 days unless you ask me to keep it, and it's never shared with anyone. Prefer not to send a file at all? We'll do the whole thing on a screen share and it never leaves your computer.
Who I am
Deadwax Royalties
I've spent my working life around music. At some point I pulled my own distributor statement, actually read it line by line, and realised I had no way to tell whether it was correct — so I built something that could read it for me. It found a month simply absent from the reporting. It also made me realise there were three organisations I'd never heard of that had been holding money for songs like mine the entire time.
Most independent artists are in exactly that position and have no idea. That's the whole reason this exists.
What I'm not: not a lawyer, not an accountant, and not affiliated with the MLC, any PRO, or SoundExchange. I read statements and fill in registrations correctly. Anything touching a contract dispute or your taxes needs a professional, and I'll tell you that rather than guess.
Straight answers
The initial read of your statement costs nothing — I'd rather show you what's there than describe it. If there's work worth doing after that, I'll quote it before anything starts, and it's a flat fee. No percentage of your royalties, ever.
You can, and if you'd rather, go do it — start at the MLC portal and your PRO's site. All three are free to join and the MLC even publishes a free course on it.
What you'd be getting from me is that it takes most people a confused afternoon and a couple of wrong entries, versus forty-five minutes with someone who's done it repeatedly — plus a read on the statement you can't interpret yet.
Reasonable question. Here's structure instead of a promise: no percentage, no contract, nothing recurring, and I'm never between you and your money. Every royalty flows directly from the MLC, your PRO and SoundExchange into your account — there's no point at which I'm holding it.
No. Those are publishing administrators — they collect for you and take 15–20% of your publishing for as long as it earns. This is a one-time setup, registered in your own name, with no cut.
They also don't cover SoundExchange — Songtrust and TuneCore Publishing both say so explicitly. That's the master side, a separate pipe. And a warning nobody volunteers: if you're on CD Baby Pro or CDB Boost, you generally can't also use Songtrust.
If what you want is someone collecting across dozens of foreign societies on your behalf, an administrator is genuinely the better choice, and I'll say so.
Almost certainly not. Business managers do accounting — bookkeeping, taxes, bill-pay, reconciling statements. Registering works at the MLC and your PRO is rights administration, a different job entirely.
So the business manager assumes the publisher handles it, the publisher assumes the manager does, and the works sit unregistered. This happens at every level — recovery firms have pulled six figures out of catalogs belonging to artists with full teams.
Registration is fast. Money is slow. Expect your first meaningful payments six to twelve months out, then quarterly. Some MLC money can be claimed retroactively, but most of the value is forward-looking.
I'd rather put that on this page than surprise you later. Anyone promising a quick check is selling you something else.
Then I tell you that, and we're done. That's what the first read is for.
At very small catalogs the honest answer is often "your setup is broken but the money isn't material yet" — which is still worth knowing, because fixing it now is free and fixing it after a song takes off is not.
One file: your distributor's sales or transactions export, CSV or Excel. No logins, no passwords, no bank details, and no access to your distributor account.
Send one artist's most recent distributor statement. You'll get a short video back showing what I found and roughly what it's worth.
Email me a statement →larryw@deadwaxroyalties.com