Introduction

So every 3 months we get a statement from the PRS, which is the performing right society in the UK which collects our royalties from film, tv and streaming. These are publishing royalties, so it the money you get for being a writer.

This is always a good day for us and is always a surprise. I have found this type of work to be a bit of numbers game. Luckily we have a good agent who gets us lots of placements in this field. We generally work for different song libraries whom we sign exclusive rights to different pieces of music. These go in some quite big libraries and then we kind of have to wait and see if they get used.

I will add a warning here to anyone who thinks this is all good. There are many libraries who want to sign your music away, locking up the rights but will never get you any royalties so be careful if you are going into this and do your research.

How it makes money?

Well our music is being played all over the world. We never know where things are being played. What is nice about this form of income is that it is passive. Take example this song we wrote like 15 years ago being used in Denmark for something! You will see how this can generate into a passive income, all be in £8.06 this starts to build up.

Now that was just for 1 TV show I think as it does not give many details. That song over all earned a bit more than that as it was played on a few other TV shows too. However this is the kicker I co-wrote that song with 1 other person, yet I only have 25% of the royalties....good agents and manager are expensive. however it does pay off... 25% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

However what I sometimes like is the randomness of it all, this is a very throw away song written too many years ago. Not only does it still provide an income, it seems to have been used in Chillie....we never find out sometimes where these songs are used.

You also get some little bits and bobs for radio things

And also for different things such as Twitch when people use the music for different things I guess, although again a lot of this is a mystery .....

Then do not forget you also receive PRS money for streaming services....not sure we gonna get rich from this but again this is a numbers game... 1 song can earn a little bit more cash so it can;t be bad!

Conclusion

Like I said this is all a numbers game, number of songs, number of plays, numbers of uses. We long ago worked this out and have spent many years getting 1000's of songs out there as writers and producers. So we now get paid every 3 months without doing any more work. Are we millionaires? No definitely not however is it nice to get paid in cash every 3 months ....definitely yes.

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