13 Ways to Make Money With Your Songs

If you write songs, and your songs are sold, downloaded, streamed or used in many other ways, they’re generating songwriter royalties for you.  Awesome, right?

Nowadays, the types of songwriter royalties earned fall into two buckets: Physical/Analog Songwriter Royalties (generated from old school music industry), and Digital Songwriter Royalties (generated from the modern digital music industry). With all of the different ways your compositions can be used in both industry models, there’s a good chance your songs are generating money you’re not even aware of, which means you’re missing out on collecting your money, and that ain’t cool. So, to make sure that stops now, we’ve outlined 13 ways that your songs make you money.

But one note before we begin: each income stream and type of royalty explained below is generated from both the original recording of a song or “composition” (i.e. the Beatles’ version of “Yesterday”), and off of a cover of the song.