Neighbouring rights explained: the radio royalty most indie artists outside the US never claim

Streaming income arrives through your distributor. A whole second stream of money doesn't: the royalty paid when a recording is played on the radio, on TV, or over the speakers in a gym or a shop. Outside the US this is usually called neighbouring rights, and it is collected by societies such as PPL in the UK. If you self-release, you may be owed it twice, once as the owner of the master and once as a performer on it. PPL can only pay you once you register.

Who gets paid, and how much?

PPL licenses broadcasters and businesses that play recorded music, then pays the money out recording by recording. According to PPL's own explainer, after costs half of the money for a track goes to the recording rightsholder and half to the performers who qualify on that track. Several performers share their half under a performer share agreement or PPL's allocation policy.

"Performer" is broader than the name on the cover. PPL says a performance generally includes every audible contribution to the recording, so session players and backing vocalists count. A studio producer who gives musical direction while a performance is recorded can also qualify, as a non-featured performer.

The scale is real. PPL reported revenue of £315.3 million for 2025, up from £301.0 million. International income rose 16% to £94.0 million. It paid more than 182,000 performers and rightsholders, 16,000 of them for the first time.

A right your label can't take

In the UK the performer's share is a statutory right, not a favour. Section 182D of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives performers equitable remuneration when a commercially published recording is played in public or broadcast. The sound-recording owner owes that remuneration. A performer can't assign the right except to a collecting society, and any contract term that excludes or restricts it has no effect. A bad record deal can take your master. It can't take this.

Worked example: the self-releasing artist

Say you wrote, played and sang a track at home and released it on your own label name. You own the master and you are its featured performer.

• Register as a rightsholder and add the recording to PPL's repertoire, with its ISRC. That claims the rightsholder half.
• Register as a performer and check you appear in the track's line-up. That claims your place in the performer half.
• Add your session players. If a friend played bass, they claim their own non-featured share. If the track isn't in the database, PPL tells performers to ask the rightsholder to add it, which here means you.

Suppose, purely as an illustration, £100 is allocated to the track after costs. £50 goes to the rightsholder side and £50 to the performers. If you register only as a performer, the master half has no claimant until you do. That is the money most often left on the table.

Why US artists miss out abroad

The Rome Convention set the international model: users of commercial recordings pay a single equitable remuneration to performers, producers or both, and countries may limit or opt out of it. The US didn't follow that model for radio. SoundExchange says plainly that there is currently no US performance right for over-the-air broadcasts. Its royalties come from non-interactive digital services, split by 17 U.S.C. § 114(g): 50% to the copyright owner, 45% to featured artists, and 2.5% each to funds for non-featured musicians and vocalists.

Other countries mirror that gap. PPL's qualification rules list the United States as a qualifying country "only for the digital transmissions" where UK performers would be paid in the US. A US citizen who recorded in Nashville therefore gets nothing from PPL for UK FM airplay, only for the kinds of digital transmission that pay UK performers in the US.

The same rules show the way around it. A performance qualifies through the performer's citizenship or residence at the time, or through the country where it was recorded, and PPL uses whichever favours the performer. Take a US singer who cuts a track in a London studio while on tour. That performance qualifies in full, and PPL's own example says the place of performance is where the performer physically was, not where the studio feed went.

This is being fought in court. The AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund and the two US unions sued the UK government, seeking damages for about 33,000 US performers. In a July 2025 procedural ruling the High Court struck out the claims the Fund and unions brought in their own names, but let the representative claim on behalf of performers continue. In the US, the American Music Fairness Act (H.R. 861) would create a radio performance right.

India: a right on paper, a market in flux

India gives performers a royalty right in law. Section 38A of the Copyright Act, 1957, added in 2012, says a performer is entitled to royalties when their performance is made for commercial use, even after agreeing to its use in a film. Collection on the recording side has been messy. SpicyIP reports that PPL India was registered again as a copyright society for sound recordings on 11 June 2026, after years of disputes. SpicyIP counts two registered societies for sound recordings now, PPL and RMPL, and asks whether both registrations can survive. India is also on PPL UK's list of qualifying countries, so Indian performers on recordings played in the UK can claim there. (PPL India's own licence FAQ, the link in our brief, blocked our fetches, so we haven't relied on it.)

Checklist

1. Join your home society as a performer (PPL in the UK). PPL says registration is free.
2. If you own masters, register as a rightsholder too, and load every release with its ISRC.
3. Check each track's performer line-up and claim any missing roles, with evidence such as session sheets or credits.
4. Get an International Performer Number (IPN) through your society, so foreign societies can match you.
5. Give your society a worldwide mandate if you get airplay abroad. PPL charges a flat 7% service charge on international collections, and foreign societies may take their own costs.
6. US performers: become a SoundExchange member, not just a registrant. Only membership lets it claim internationally through its more than 50 agreements in 35 countries. Recording abroad can change what you qualify for.
7. Keep session paperwork: who played what, where, and their nationality or residence at the time. Qualification turns on those facts.

What we think

Neighbouring rights are one of the few income streams the law protects against bad contracts. In the UK the performer share can't be bargained away. That makes it unusually artist-friendly, and the low uptake is mostly a paperwork problem.

Who loses? Self-releasing artists who register as performers but never as rightsholders, and session musicians who assume the featured artist's registration covers them. The US gap is the bigger structural failure. Because US radio pays performers nothing, US performers are shut out of much of the money abroad, even though their recordings are being played. Whatever reciprocity is meant to achieve, in practice it punishes musicians, not the broadcasters who lobby against a radio right. Until that changes, the most useful advice for a US player is unglamorous: record abroad when you can, and keep proof of where you did.

India is the market to watch. The statute is strong, but two registered societies for sound recordings could mean double licensing for venues or gaps for performers. Indian artists should register and keep their own play logs rather than trust that the money will find them.