Music Royalties in India, Explained

Why does one song generate several different royalties?

One song generates several royalties because Indian copyright law treats a song as more than one work. The composition — the melody and the lyrics — is one copyright. The sound recording of that composition is a separate copyright. Different organisations license each one, so the same play can trigger payments through different pipes.

That single distinction explains almost every confusing royalty question an Indian artist has. When a café plays your track, the café's licence covers both the composition (licensed by IPRS) and the recording (licensed by PPL India). When someone streams it on Spotify, your distributor collects the recording side. If you wrote the song yourself, both sides are ultimately yours — but only if you have registered for both.

What are the four royalty pools an Indian artist can earn from?

An independent Indian artist can be owed from four pools: streaming recording royalties, IPRS publishing royalties, PPL public performance royalties, and platform revenue from YouTube Content ID and CRBT. Each pool has a different payer and a different registration, and none of them pays you automatically.

How do streaming royalties actually work?

Streaming royalties are a share of a revenue pool, not a fixed rate per play. Each store collects subscription and advertising money in a market, deducts its share, and divides the remainder among rights-holders according to their share of total plays. That is why "how much per stream" has no single answer.

Three variables move the number more than anything an artist controls. Territory: a play in a high-ARPU market is worth more than a play in a low-ARPU one. Tier: paid-subscriber plays are worth several times ad-supported plays. Store: rates differ substantially between Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and the Indian services.

The context here is a growing pool. Global recorded music revenue reached $31.7 billion in 2025, up 6.4%, with paid streaming at 52.4% of the total and 837 million paid subscription accounts worldwide, per the IFPI Global Music Report 2026. Asia grew 10.9% year on year. A larger pool with more paying subscribers is what lifts per-stream value over time.

What is IPRS and do you need to join?

IPRS is the Indian copyright society for authors, composers, lyricists and publishers. It licenses the underlying musical work and lyrics to broadcasters, venues, events and platforms, then distributes the collected royalties to its registered members. If you wrote your song, IPRS money is yours and no distributor can collect it for you.

Join as the role that matches your contribution — author (lyricist), composer, or publisher — and then register each work with accurate splits. The registration step is the one artists skip, and an unregistered work simply does not appear in the distribution run. Details and membership criteria are on the IPRS website.

What is PPL India and how is it different?

PPL India licenses the sound recording for public performance and broadcast — the recording being played in a restaurant, a gym, a retail store, an event or on radio. Where IPRS represents the people who wrote the song, PPL represents the people who own the master. PPL India holds copyright society status for sound recording public performance licensing.

For an independent artist who financed their own recording, the master is usually theirs, which makes them the rights-holder PPL would pay. If you signed the master to a label, the label collects that side instead. Confirming who owns the master is therefore the first step, not the last — our copyright guide covers how ownership is established under the Copyright Act, 1957.

How do YouTube and CRBT revenue differ from streaming?

YouTube Content ID and CRBT are platform revenue rather than classic royalties, and both behave differently from streaming. Content ID pays you from other people's videos that contain your recording. CRBT pays you a share of a recurring monthly subscription rather than a per-play amount.

The practical difference is stability. Streaming income tracks attention and decays as a release ages. CRBT income tracks subscriptions and holds while people keep the tune set — which is why regional and devotional catalogues often show a flatter, longer earnings curve than their stream counts suggest. The mechanics are in the CRBT setup guide and the Content ID guide.

How do you make sure you are actually paid?

Being owed a royalty and being paid one are different states. Four checks close the gap, and all four are administrative rather than creative:

1. Verify payout details before your first release, not after your first statement. Bank and tax verification is the most common cause of a delayed first payment.
2. Keep artist name spelling identical across every release. Split profiles split royalties and are painful to merge later.
3. Register works with IPRS and the recording with PPL. Distribution does not do this for you.
4. Read the monthly statement by store and country. If a store you selected shows no revenue after three months, the delivery may have failed silently.

T9music reports monthly across streaming, YouTube and CRBT, and has been running that payout cycle since 2010. The plan-level differences — a 90/10 split on the Free plan and 100% royalties on Pro Artist, with 100% music rights retained by the artist on both — are set out on the pricing page.