# Music, sync and royalty rights: the paperwork behind every soundtrack
In 2023, several classic sitcoms and films quietly disappeared from streaming libraries, not because of quality control or content disputes, but because the music licenses baked into the original broadcast deals never anticipated streaming at all. A show can survive a bad review. It cannot survive a missing signature on a sync license.
This is the invisible infrastructure of media: every needle drop, karaoke scene, or trailer cue sits on top of a stack of overlapping rights, each controlled by a different party, each requiring separate clearance. Get one wrong and the fix isn't a re-edit. It's a takedown.
Every recorded song carries two distinct copyrights, and this split is the root of almost all licensing complexity.
1. The musical composition: the underlying melody and lyrics, owned by the songwriter and/or their music publisher.
2. The sound recording (the "master"): the specific recorded performance, owned by the artist and/or their record label.
Taylor Swift's re-recordings ("Taylor's Version") exist because of this split: she owns her compositions but originally didn't own her masters, so she re-recorded the masters to control both halves.
Any use of music in film, TV, games or ads requires clearing rights tied to *both* copyrights, from *both* sets of owners, separately.
When a song plays on the radio, in a bar, or in a public broadcast, the composition owner is owed a performance royalty
PROs license broadcasters, streaming platforms and venues in bulk, collect royalties, and distribute them to songwriters and publishers based on play data. This is why a bar owner pays an annual PRS or ASCAP fee rather than negotiating per song.
Performance royalties matter enormously for television and radio, but they do *not* cover the right to embed a song into a film or show. That's a separate license.
A mechanical royalty compensates the composition owner when a song is reproduced, historically pressed onto a physical record (hence "mechanical"), now applied to downloads and interactive streams.
In the US, mechanical licensing for streaming and downloads is now largely administered through the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), created under the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (MMA). The MMA established a blanket mechanical license for streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, replacing a chaotic song-by-song negotiation system that had led to lawsuits over unpaid royalties.
For context: streaming services pay a statutory mechanical royalty rate set periodically by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), a panel of judges within the US Library of Congress that sets rates when parties can't agree. As of the most recent published rate structures, mechanical royalties for interactive streaming are calculated as a percentage of service revenue, subject to per-subscriber minimums (exact rates are technical and revised periodically, so treat any specific percentage as an estimate that should be checked against current CRB determinations).
Here's the license that governs "a song plays during a scene": the synchronization license, or sync license.
A sync license grants the right to pair a musical composition with visual media, film, TV, ads, trailers, games. It is negotiated privately (not through a PRO or collective) directly with the publisher, and a parallel master use license must be negotiated with the label or master owner for the actual recording.
This is why licensing a hit song for a key scene often costs far more than licensing an obscure indie track: you're negotiating twice, with two separate rights holders, each of whom can say no.
Practical implications:
For a deeper primer on how these categories interact, the US Copyright Office's circular on sound recordings is a clear, free primary source.
Outside the US, many countries also recognize neighboring rights (sometimes called "related rights"): royalties owed to performers and record labels (not just songwriters) when a recording is publicly broadcast or performed. This is distinct from mechanical/sync licensing and is collected by separate bodies, such as PPL in the UK or SoundExchange in the US (which specifically handles digital performance royalties for non-interactive streaming like satellite and webcasting radio, under a compulsory license created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998).
For a global production, this means a single soundtrack choice can trigger obligations across four or five separate collecting systems, each with different rates, territories and reporting requirements.
Vérification des acquis
1. Why did classic shows disappear from streaming libraries due to music licensing issues?
2. Why did Taylor Swift need to re-record her masters to fully control her music?
3. What core problem do Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) like ASCAP, BMI, and PRS for Music solve?
4. Select ALL correct answers about the two copyrights embedded in every recorded song.
Sélectionnez toutes les réponses correctes.
5. Select ALL correct answers about why music licensing is described as complex 'invisible infrastructure.'
Sélectionnez toutes les réponses correctes.
Music licensing mistakes are unusually public because the failure mode is often a takedown or a silent edit, not a quiet settlement. Recent, well-documented examples of the pattern (without specific financial figures, which vary and are often undisclosed):
For a producer or platform executive, the practical takeaway is that rights clearance has to be scoped for every distribution window in advance: theatrical, broadcast, SVOD (subscription video on demand), AVOD (ad-supported video on demand), international syndication, home video. Retrofitting rights after the fact is expensive or impossible.
🎬 [VIDEO: "How Music Licensing Works (Sync, Mechanical, Performance)" - youtube.com - search for licensing-industry explainer channels covering sync vs. mechanical vs. performance royalties for a visual walkthrough of the rights stack]