MODULE 05 / 09
Global Sub-Publishing & Collection
“Roughly half of streaming happens outside your home country. So does your money.”
Your U.S. registrations only collect efficiently at home. Every other country has its own societies, its own mechanical regimes, and its own black box — and foreign royalties that aren't actively claimed leak away at every border. This module maps how money flows internationally, compares your four collection options with real math, and shows you how to back-claim the pipeline income you've already earned abroad.
What you'll be able to do
- Trace how a stream in Germany becomes (or fails to become) a payment to you
- Compare reciprocal collection vs. admin deals vs. sub-publishers — with fee math
- Understand 'at source' vs. 'net receipts' and why the same deal % pays differently
- Know the major foreign societies and what makes each territory quirky
- Run a back-claim to recover the last 3 years of stranded foreign royalties
Why Money Gets Stranded Overseas
Performance and mechanical collection is territorial: each country's societies collect for usage inside that country under local law and local rates. Your PRO can pull foreign performance money home through reciprocal agreements, but mechanicals abroad often have no automatic path to a U.S. indie writer at all. The result is systematic leakage.
- Time decay: foreign performance royalties routed via reciprocal agreements typically arrive 12–24 months after the usage — if they arrive.
- Matching decay: your metadata passes through two or three databases in translation; every hop loses a percentage to mismatches.
- The foreign black box: unmatched money abroad is eventually distributed to local publishers by market share — your unclaimed German royalties literally become revenue for German publishers.
- Mechanical gap: many territories pay streaming mechanicals only to publishers registered locally. No local representation = that stream of income never even starts toward you.
How Foreign Royalties Flow: Two Paths Home
Path A — Reciprocal: A play in Paris is logged by SACEM. SACEM deducts its local fee, holds the writer's share for your PRO under their reciprocal agreement, and remits periodically. Your PRO deducts its administration and pays you a year or two later. Crucially, this handles performance royalties only, and only the writer's share flows automatically if you have no foreign publisher representation.
Path B — Local representation: A sub-publisher or global admin registers your catalog directly with SACEM (and GEMA, PRS, JASRAC…). They claim performance publisher-share AND mechanicals at the source, chase mismatches in the local language, and pay you on their cycle. They charge for this — the math below shows why it's usually worth it once you have real foreign usage.
- Sub-publisher
- A local publisher in a foreign territory who represents your catalog there under contract, typically for 10–25% of what they collect in that territory.
- Pipeline income
- Royalties already earned but not yet paid through the chain. When you sign new representation, negotiating who gets pipeline is a real deal point.
- Central licensing
- Pan-European digital licensing hubs (e.g. ICE for GEMA/PRS/STIM territory) that let one registration cover multiple countries' online usage — a big reason modern admin deals collect Europe efficiently.
Your Four Options for Global Collection
Full lesson in the Pro curriculum
'At Source' vs. 'Net Receipts': The Clause Worth Thousands
When any deal collects foreign money for you, the royalty base matters as much as the percentage. An 'at source' deal calculates your share on what was earned in the territory. A 'net receipts' (or 'receipts') deal calculates it on what…
Full lesson in the Pro curriculum
The Societies That Matter (A Field Guide)
You'll never deal with most foreign societies directly, but knowing the landscape lets you read statements, spot missing territories, and sanity-check your representation's coverage.
Full lesson in the Pro curriculum
Back-Claiming: Recovering What You've Already Earned
Societies hold unmatched royalties for a limited window — commonly around three years — before redistributing them. That window is your recovery period. When you first set up global representation (or a new admin), running a structured b…
Full lesson in the Pro curriculum
Unlock all 6 lessons in this module
Pro unlocks every lesson in all 9 modules — the worked royalty math, the registration walk-throughs, and the contract playbooks — plus unlimited split sheets and songs in your dashboard.