Music Royalties for Beginners - Mechanicals

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So there are different types of royalties songwriters (and publishers) can be paid.

What used to be called "mechanical" royalties were the albums pressed (CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks); however, now it mostly applies to downloads. The mechanical royalties are essentially the sales of a song or album. Mechanicals pay $.091 (9.1 cents) per song or album sold. Split that with the publisher and you're down to four and a half cents, and you may have to split that with co-writers, the artist who recorded it, managers, producers, etc.

If you co-wrote one song for which the songwriters received 100% of the songwriter royalties (and the publisher received 100% of publisher royalties, so 50/50 on the $.091), and the song/album sold 1 million copies, this would be your earnings on a platinum album:

.091 x .4 = .0455
.0455 x .5 = .02275
.02275 x 1M = 22,750

Co-writing a song on an album that goes platinum brings in $22,750 USD for mechanical royalties. It would be more disappointing if the Performance Royalties, on which I will write next, did not exist.