Music Distribution 101: Participants&Royalty Splits

Did you know you can now easily add participants of your releases and split royalties with featured artists, producers or your team members at Afrotunes?

First of all, let’s go through the definition of participants in your releases: participants are anyone who contributed to the track that you are releasing, for example, composer, artist, label, author, and so on. You can dictate the royalty splits between all participants as well. Please note that you need to add at least one participant for each track！

Let’s talk about the producer deals today. The most common deal between an artist and a producer gives a producer a flat fee for their work in addition to some royalties.

For example, a $100 fee to produce the song, plus 15%-30% (standard for independent producers) of the song’s net royalties. For your information, “net” means the royalties left over after recording costs, producer fee and distribution costs etc are taken out from the profit.

If there are multiple producers working on the same track, typically each producer would take a share of the total “producer” percentage offered by the artist. Eg. a 30% producer percentage split between 3 producers at 10% each.

If you’re part of a band, this can be a little trickier. We recommend to split royalties and rights evenly between each band member to keep things easy. In hip hop, the producer will usually request 50%, while the other top liners will split the remaining 50%.

Last part, how to manage my participants at Afrotunes? Please go to “Payment-Participants” to add new participants, input their PayPal email addresses, and fill in their outlet profiles. However, this is not mandatory, which means you can choose to take all the royalties and split to all the members as you want.

Check out more at afrotunesdigital.com

You can also check our previous article for more details about Afrotunes.

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*Limited offer: free music distribution service to Boomplay. (original price:1.99$ per artist)