Why Do Songwriters Get Paid Differently From Artists?

When listeners press play, it is easy to imagine that the resulting money belongs to the artist whose name appears on the screen. The legal and commercial reality is more complicated because a recorded song contains more than one piece of intellectual property. Copyright law generally treats the musical work—the underlying composition and lyrics—and the sound recording as separate works, and those rights can belong to different people or companies.

That distinction explains much of the confusion surrounding music streaming. A singer can perform a song without owning the composition. A songwriter can own a composition without appearing on the recording. One person can occupy both roles, while a label, publisher, producer or other rights holder may control some of the associated rights. When a streaming service licenses the music, it therefore is not simply paying “the artist” for a play. It is dealing with different rights attached to the same listening experience.

The difference becomes especially important when people try to calculate what an individual creator earns from streaming. There is no universal amount that “the artist gets” or “the songwriter gets” from a stream. The service calculates and distributes money associated with different rights, and the amount ultimately received by an individual depends on ownership, territory, contracts, collection arrangements and the particular rights involved. Spotify itself says that recording royalties and publishing royalties are separate, with recording money paid through the relevant licensor and publishing money going to publishers, collecting societies and mechanical agencies.

Imagine a track called Black Horizon. Someone writes the melody and lyrics. Someone performs the vocal. Someone produces the recording. A label may finance and own the master recording. A publisher may administer the composition. In another case, the songwriter may also be the performer, producer and owner of the recording. The sound heard by the listener is the same finished piece of music, but the legal rights behind it can have completely different ownership.

The composition is the underlying song: its melody, lyrics and musical structure. The sound recording, often called the master, is the particular recorded performance that a listener hears. The U.S. Copyright Office explicitly identifies these as separate copyright-protected works that are commonly owned and licensed separately.

That separation predates Spotify. Streaming did not create the distinction; it made the financial consequences more visible because digital services use both sides of the copyright system. A recording needs permission to be streamed, while the underlying composition also generates publishing royalties. In the United States, interactive streaming also involves mechanical royalties for musical works, administered under the statutory framework established by the Music Modernization Act.

This is why asking how much “a song” earns can be misleading. The song is not necessarily a single economic asset with a single owner. The composition and recording can travel through different contractual chains before revenue reaches the people responsible for creating them.

The most familiar example is a recording performed by an artist who did not write it. Suppose a singer records a composition written entirely by another songwriter. When the recording is streamed, the singer may have rights connected to the sound recording, depending on the ownership and contractual structure. The songwriter has rights in the underlying composition. Those rights do not disappear simply because the listener encountered the song through the singer’s recording.

The opposite situation is just as important. A songwriter can write a composition that is recorded by another performer and earn publishing income from that use without receiving the same recording royalties associated with the particular master. The songwriter’s economic interest follows the composition, while the recording-related income follows the ownership and licensing of the sound recording.

This becomes particularly relevant for artists who write their own material. If one person writes, performs, records and owns the relevant rights, that person may participate in several revenue streams generated by the same track. That does not mean every dollar automatically arrives in one payment. It means the creator may have several distinct claims connected to different rights.

The distinction is therefore less about “songwriters versus artists” than it first appears. These are overlapping roles. A songwriter may be an artist. An artist may be a songwriter. A producer may have contractual participation. A label may own the master. A publisher may administer compositions. The more roles one creator controls personally, the fewer separate ownership layers there may be between the listener and the creator.

Publishing is where the system becomes unfamiliar to many listeners. Streaming services do not simply send a songwriter a percentage of the money generated by an individual listener’s subscription. Publishing royalties can involve different categories of rights, including performance and mechanical royalties, and the collection system varies by territory. Spotify explains that publishing royalties from streaming involve both performing and mechanical royalties, with the split and administration differing between countries.

In the United States, for example, the Mechanical Licensing Collective administers the blanket mechanical licensing system created by the Music Modernization Act. It collects and distributes mechanical royalties to eligible songwriters, composers, lyricists, publishers, administrators and collective management organisations.

The UK operates within a different rights-collection framework, with organisations such as PRS for Music playing a role in administering relevant songwriter and publisher rights. The important point for a listener is not memorising every collecting society. It is understanding why the same stream can create obligations to different rights holders.

A songwriter who has retained their publishing rights therefore has a different financial relationship with a streaming service from an artist whose recording is controlled by a label. If that songwriter has assigned publishing rights to a publisher or administrator, the money may pass through that organisation before reaching the songwriter according to their agreement.

That is why two creators can contribute equally to a recording yet see very different payment structures. Their creative contribution and their legal ownership are not necessarily the same thing.

The other side of the transaction concerns the sound recording. Streaming services pay recording royalties to the rights holder that licensed the recording. In many cases that means a record label; for independently released music, it may involve a distributor or another licensing intermediary. Spotify states that recording royalties are paid to artists through the licensor that delivered the music, typically a record label or distributor.

The contract between that intermediary and the artist then becomes crucial.

An artist signed to a label may have agreed to a particular royalty arrangement, deductions, recoupment provisions or ownership structure. An independent artist who owns the master and distributes it through a service may have a very different arrangement. The streaming platform cannot determine the artist’s final personal income merely from the amount allocated to the recording rights holder.

This is one reason the popular idea of a universal “streaming rate” is so unreliable. Spotify does not describe its system as paying artists a fixed amount per play. Its current explanation says recording royalties are allocated according to streamshare from the relevant royalty pool, after applicable deductions from revenue, and that the amount ultimately received by an artist varies according to agreements with labels or distributors.

The listener therefore sees one event—playing a track—while the business processes several separate rights relationships behind that event.

There is another reason the distinction matters: a composition can have a life beyond one particular recording.

A songwriter’s work can be recorded by different performers, licensed for different uses, performed publicly, reproduced physically or digitally, and incorporated into other commercial contexts where the relevant rights are licensed. The economic value of the composition is therefore not necessarily tied to the success of a single master recording.

A successful recording can also increase the value of the underlying composition. If a song becomes widely known, the composition may generate publishing income through multiple forms of use. The master and the composition remain separate assets even when the public associates them almost entirely with one particular performance.

This is one reason music publishing has become such a significant part of the modern music business. Spotify reported in 2026 that 2025 marked its largest annual music-publishing payout to date and said it had paid approximately $5 billion to publishers and organisations representing songwriters over the preceding two years.

Those figures do not mean an individual songwriter receives a predictable percentage of Spotify’s revenue. They demonstrate something more useful: the composition represents a distinct economic right inside the streaming economy, rather than simply being an invisible component of the recording.

For independent musicians, the most interesting question is often what happens when the creative roles and ownership rights sit with the same person.

An artist who writes the song, performs it, owns the master and retains their publishing interests can potentially participate in multiple sides of the revenue generated by that work. That does not eliminate costs. Distribution, administration, promotion, production, taxes and other business expenses still exist. Nor does it mean every royalty category is paid directly by the streaming service.

What changes is the ownership chain.

There may be fewer parties standing between the original creator and the revenue generated by the work. Instead of having a label take a contractual share of recording income and a publisher participate in publishing income, an independent creator may retain those interests personally or manage them through selected service providers.

That distinction is particularly relevant when considering what “independent” actually means. Uploading music without a record label does not automatically mean an artist owns every associated right. Conversely, working with a distributor does not necessarily mean giving that distributor ownership of the music. Administration, licensing and ownership are separate questions that have to be examined in the actual agreement.

For listeners, this creates a practical way to think about supporting independent musicians: where you listen is one decision; how you support the creator is another. Streaming can help generate royalty income, but buying music directly can create a different relationship between the listener and the creator because the transaction does not depend on exactly the same platform-based revenue structure.

That is one reason direct purchases can be meaningful for genuinely independent projects. If you want to explore music created outside the conventional label system, the official UNIDARK Hub provides a direct route into the project, its releases and its wider catalogue. For listeners who specifically want to support the music through a direct purchase, the Official UNIDARK Store provides another option.

The simplest way to understand the difference is to stop thinking of streaming income as one pot of money divided among everyone involved in a track. There are separate rights attached to the composition and the recording, and those rights can have different owners, licences, collection systems and contractual arrangements.

A songwriter is paid for rights connected to the musical work. A recording artist may receive income connected to the sound recording. If the same person wrote and performed the song and owns both sets of rights, their position can be very different from that of a performer recording somebody else’s composition under a label agreement. If a publisher or label owns or administers some of those rights, the money can pass through those organisations before reaching the creator.

The practical consequence is that the name displayed beside a track in a streaming application tells you surprisingly little about the full ownership structure behind it. The visible artist credit identifies the performer or principal act; it does not necessarily identify the owner of the composition, the master, the publishing rights or the contracts governing the revenue.

For anyone trying to understand music economics, that is the more useful distinction to remember. A stream is not one payment to one artist. It is the commercial use of a recorded work that contains multiple rights, and the people who control those rights can be different.

For independent artists, that makes ownership worth understanding long before a track becomes successful. For listeners, it explains why supporting a musician directly can mean something different from simply adding another play to a streaming count. And for anyone exploring music outside the mainstream industry, the ownership structure can become part of the appeal: you can choose to discover artists whose creative work and business relationships are more directly connected.

UNIDARK, also known as Morning Star, is a UK-based independent extreme metal producer and the creator of Blackdeathgrin Metal — an original extreme metal genre combining elements of black metal, death metal, deathcore, and grindcore.

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