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Money goes missing in two very different ways. The first: royalties that were collected for your music but never reached you, because a registration is broken — the “black box”. The second: usage nobody ever detected, so no royalty was generated at all. Most guides and tools only cover the first. This page covers both, step by step.
Up front, because it matters: nobody can honestly promise you an amount before looking at your catalogue. What you can do is close every gap systematically — most of the steps below are free and take an afternoon.
Your performing rights organisation (ASCAP, BMI or SESAC in the US, PRS in the UK, Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands, GEMA in Germany, SACEM in France) holds performance royalties for your compositions. Log in, open the last two years of statements, and check every work you released is actually listed. A work that is missing from the list earns nothing, no matter how often it is played.
Two pots of money sit outside your PRO. Digital performance royalties for the recording: SoundExchange in the US, PPL in the UK, Sena in the Netherlands, GVL in Germany. And mechanical royalties for streaming: in the US these flow through The MLC, which maintains a public database of unmatched works you can search by title. If you have never registered with these organisations, that money accrues without your name on it.
Search The MLC public database and your societies’ repertoire searches for your legal name, your artist name, old band names and common misspellings. Unmatched royalties usually exist precisely because the name or title on the usage report does not exactly match your registration.
Open your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, Amuse) and check that every release has an ISRC and that the earnings per store look plausible next to your streaming numbers. A release that never got delivered to a store, or that carries the wrong ISRC, quietly earns nothing there.
The single largest cause of unclaimed royalties is not theft but broken registration: no ISWC for the work, missing co-writer splits, an ISRC that differs between stores, no membership at the society that collects for your territory. Fixing a registration is free and applies to future earnings too. Money that societies collected but could not match is typically held for one to three years and then redistributed — so the clock matters.
Everything above finds money that was collected but not paid out. It cannot find usage that was never detected in the first place: re-uploads, sped-up and slowed edits, remixes and compilation channels that Content ID missed. No royalty database lists those, because no royalty was ever generated. The only way to find them is to scan the platforms themselves — which is what RoyaltyScanner does, and what a registration-database search cannot.
In so-called black box accounts at collecting societies and licensing collectives: money that was collected for real usage but could not be matched to a rightsholder, usually because of a missing or inconsistent registration. Societies hold these amounts for a limited period — often one to three years — and then redistribute them, typically by market share. After that, your claim on that specific money is gone.
The honest answer: they search public registration and unmatched-works databases faster than you would by hand, and that genuinely surfaces collected-but-unmatched money. What no database search can surface is usage that was never detected or licensed at all — a re-upload on a channel you do not control generates no royalty record to find. Those two problems need two different tools.
Yes — administrators and publishing services will register your works with societies worldwide and collect on your behalf, in exchange for a percentage and usually an exclusive, multi-year agreement covering your catalogue. Read the exclusivity and termination clauses before signing anything. RoyaltyScanner deliberately works differently: we do not file and do not collect. You keep full control and file yourself, through your own society or distributor, with our evidence attached.
Industry estimates put global black-box royalties in the billions of dollars. What that means for one artist is impossible to promise — it depends entirely on your catalogue, your registrations and your usage. Be wary of any service that promises you a specific amount before looking at your situation; nobody can know that in advance.
Unclaimed royalties are money that exists: usage was detected, money was collected, but it could not be matched to you. Undetected use is usage for which no money was ever generated: an unauthorised upload that no fingerprinting system flagged. Registration fixes recover the first category. Only actively scanning platforms finds the second — and finding it is worth nothing without evidence you can act on.
Checking your own PRO statements, the MLC unmatched database and your distributor dashboard is free. RoyaltyScanner’s name check is also free and requires no credit card: it shows what is circulating around your artist name on open platforms. Full scans and signed evidence dossiers are part of the paid plans. We never take a percentage of anything you recover.
Registration fixes recover collected-but-unmatched money. RoyaltyScanner covers the half nobody else does: we scan the platforms themselves for uses of your actual audio — re-uploads, sped-up edits, remixes, channels you do not control — and every confirmed finding comes with a digitally signed evidence dossier: a SHA-256 hash, an independent RFC 3161 timestamp, and a public verification page anyone can check.
We also check your registration health — ISRC, work registration, society membership — and generate a ready-to-send submission packet per desk: one for your distributor, one for your collecting society, one for the platform. We never file on your behalf and never take a percentage: you stay in control. See how verification works →
Free name check, free account in two minutes, no credit card. No percentage of anything you recover.
Run the free name check →