Played on a record? The AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund may owe you money

If you have played bass on someone else's single, sung backing vocals on an album, or sat in a horn section for a session, there may be money waiting for you. It comes from a royalty built into US law, and the fund that pays it keeps a public list of performers it can't find.

Where does the money come from?

When a non-interactive digital service plays a recording in the US (satellite radio, webcasting and similar services that operate under the statutory licence, rather than on-demand streams), it pays SoundExchange. The split of that money is written into the law. Under 17 U.S.C. § 114(g)(2), 50% goes to the owner of the recording, 45% to the featured artist, 2.5% into an escrow account for non-featured musicians and 2.5% into one for non-featured vocalists. The statute says the musicians' share is paid whether or not they belong to the American Federation of Musicians, and the vocalists' share works the same way.

The administrator of both escrow accounts is the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund. Its sound-recording division began operating in 2000. The Fund says the biggest share of its money is this SoundExchange digital performance income. On top of that come US private-copy royalties under the Audio Home Recording Act (where 17 U.S.C. § 1006 reserves 2⅝% of the sound-recordings pool for non-featured musicians and 1⅜% for non-featured vocalists), private-copy money from collectives abroad, and record-rental money from Japan.

Featured artists aren't paid by the Fund. Their 45% comes straight from SoundExchange.

Who counts as "non-featured"?

The Fund's distribution guidelines define a non-featured performer as a musician (music preparation staff included) or vocalist who is not the name billed most prominently on the recording. So the session drummer, the string section, the choir and the backing singers count. The band's frontperson doesn't.

You don't need a union card for the US money. The Fund says payments from US sources and some foreign territories go to non-members too, but many foreign collectives only let it pay AFM or SAG-AFTRA members.

How the Fund decides what you get

The Fund doesn't pay on every recording. Its guidelines say it builds a distribution list from SoundExchange's performance data for each year. Every recording on that list gets a pro-rata share based on its market share, and that share is divided equally among the non-featured musicians identified on it (and, from the separate vocalists' subfund, among the vocalists). For home-recording royalties the pool is small, so the list covers only the top 100 to 250 recordings by SoundScan sales.

Several deductions and rules come before your payment:

• Admin costs are taken off before distribution.
• Up to 1.5% is held back in an "omissions fund" to fix disputes and missed credits.
• No check under $50. Smaller amounts carry over until they reach $50, or until three years pass. If you sign up for direct deposit, there is no minimum.
• Tax ID required. The Fund won't pay anyone without a valid US taxpayer number. For foreign residents it withholds 30% unless you file a W-8BEN form to claim a tax-treaty rate.

A worked example (illustrative numbers)

Say a track on the distribution list is credited with $200,000 of statutory digital radio royalties in a year. In simplified terms, about 2.5% of that, or $5,000, comes into the musicians' subfund for that track. Five session players are credited, so each gets roughly $1,000 before admin costs and the omissions holdback. The track's three backing vocalists split a similar amount from the vocalists' subfund, so each gets more than $1,600. If a sixth musician played on the session but wasn't credited, the others are paid and that player gets nothing until they file a claim.

These figures are our simplification. The real calculation runs across the whole distribution list, but it shows why the credits matter. Your share is calculated per head, so being missing from the credits costs you everything.

How to check if you're owed money

The Fund publishes two lists. Covered Recordings shows the recordings it has paid on, with the performers credited on each. Unclaimed lists performers who are credited but whose address or Social Security number the Fund doesn't have, so it can't pay them.

1. Search Unclaimed under your legal name and any stage name. The Fund asks you not to register under several names, because it matches all your royalties itself.
2. Search Covered Recordings for every session you played on.
3. If you were left off a track, file a claim on it with evidence. Music Connection quotes the Fund suggesting contracts, session dates, studio locations, pay stubs or a note from the producer or engineer. Under the guidelines you have three years from the recording's first appearance on a covered list.
4. Give the Fund your tax ID, and a W-8BEN if you live outside the US, and set up direct deposit.
5. If you think a payment is wrong, write to the Fund's CEO within 90 days of the distribution. If you aren't satisfied with the answer, you can appeal to the trustees within 60 days.

How much money is involved?

Local 802 reported a record distribution of more than $70 million in April 2021. In mid-2023, Music Connection reported that the Fund had paid a record $91 million for 2022 and more than $650 million since it began, with an average payment of about $1,500. We couldn't find a more recent official total on the Fund's own site, so treat these as dated figures.

What we think

This is one of the few royalties in music that reaches the people who are usually paid once and forgotten. Congress built a session-player share into the statute, so no label deal can sign it away. That alone makes it worth the ten minutes it takes to check.

The weaknesses are in the plumbing. The money follows the credits, and credits are where the industry is weakest. The Fund's guidelines say it identifies performers from session reports, liner notes and databases like Discogs. If you played on a self-released record with no credits online, you are invisible to it. And because each recording's share is split per head, a missing name doesn't send money back to the pool for everyone. It quietly raises what the credited players on that track receive. The three-year claim window then closes the gap for that year's payout, and later ones only reopen if the track makes a future list. Players outside the US face more friction: a 30% default withholding, and foreign money that may need union membership.

The losers are the players who never hear of the Fund, and we suspect that is most often people doing remote sessions from home studios, where nobody files paperwork. The fix is cheap: put the full personnel in your release metadata and liner notes, and keep your session paperwork. If you hire players, credit them properly. It costs you nothing and pays them.

This matters beyond radio royalties. The AFM's Human Made, Human Paid campaign asks for consent, credit and pay when musicians' work trains AI (see our coverage). Every one of those demands depends on knowing who played on what. Session credits that are accurate today are what any future AI payment will be built on.

Checklist for session players

• Search the Unclaimed and Covered Recordings lists under every name you've used.
• Keep contracts, invoices, session dates and studio names for every session.
• Ask the artist to include your full name and instrument in the release credits.
• File missing-credit claims within three years.
• Register a tax ID, a W-8BEN if you're outside the US, and direct deposit.