If you're a Canadian musician and you haven't registered with SOCAN yet, you're leaving real money uncollected every time your song plays on the radio, streams on Spotify, or gets licensed in a film.

SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) is Canada's performing rights organization, and it collects two distinct types of royalties on your behalf.

Performance Rights

Every time your song is performed or broadcast publicly, a performance royalty is generated. This includes:

• Radio airplay (CBC, campus radio, commercial stations)
• Live performances at licensed venues
• Streaming on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
• TV, film, and commercial placements
• Background music in restaurants, bars, and retail spaces

SOCAN collects fees from these businesses and broadcasters directly and distributes the money to the writers and publishers on record. If your song isn't registered, that money gets redistributed to someone else.

Reproduction Rights

In 2017, SOCAN acquired SODRAC and expanded into reproduction rights. This covers the mechanical right, meaning the right to reproduce your composition as a recording. Think of it this way: performance rights cover the song being heard; reproduction rights cover the song being copied or duplicated.

This applies to:

• Digital downloads (iTunes, Bandcamp)
• On-demand streams (Spotify, Apple Music)
• Synced to video (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels)
• Physical manufacturing (CDs, vinyl)

Why Both Matter

Most artists only think about performance royalties. But every stream you get triggers both a performance royalty AND a mechanical royalty. If you're only collecting one, you're splitting your own income in half without knowing it.

Registering with SOCAN covers both streams under one roof, which is one of the advantages of the Canadian system versus the U.S., where writers have to register with separate organizations for each right.

How to Register

1. Go to socan.com and create a member account
2. Register yourself as a writer and/or publisher
3. Register each song (title, co-writers, ownership splits)
4. Submit a live performance log for shows at SOCAN-licensed venues
5. Make sure your distributor is reporting your streams correctly

Registration is free for songwriters. SOCAN takes a small admin percentage from collected royalties before distributing.

One thing to watch: if you co-write songs, all writers need to be SOCAN members and ownership splits need to be agreed on and registered before royalties are distributed. How you handle those splits as a band is a bigger conversation, and one we'll be covering in a dedicated post soon.

Want This as a Download?

We're building out a full Canadian Artist Resource library, including royalty checklists, submission trackers, and guides like this one, available as free downloads. Sign up for our email list and we will be sending downloads out once they're available.

This is Part 1 of the Canadian Artist Royalty Guide. Next up: the royalty stream nobody told you about, and why most Canadian artists have never collected a single dollar of it.

Every band has an origin story. Ours involves a closet, Kijiji, and a show that got booked before we were actually a band.

In the summer of 2018 I stepped back from the metal scene with the idea of starting a solo acoustic project. Being the productive person I am, I spent most of that time on Kijiji looking for musicians for something completely different. That's where I found Beau. One of us had posted an ad, the other responded, and without ever meeting in person we made a plan. He came over, walked into my vocal booth (a closet, genuinely just a closet), and tracked vocals for a song I'd sent him a few days earlier. We never did anything with that song. But something clicked. His voice was exactly what I didn't know I was looking for, and right then I knew the direction had to be pop-punk. A real band.

Now I needed a bassist. I'd played with one previously who had since moved down my back lane, so I called him up and asked him to come track bass on a few ideas. Somewhere between him showing up and us wrapping up, I casually mentioned we had a show booked and that he was playing it. He wrote the parts, so it would be easy enough, right?

Around the same time, a drummer randomly added me on Facebook. Also looking to put something together. I pitched the idea, he was in, and before we even had a name we had drum demos being tracked in a garage in Portage la Prairie.

That left us needing a name. I dug up an old notes app list I'd thrown together for the acoustic project that had quietly died a few months earlier. Most of the names on there were dark and heavy, very much still in the metal headspace. But one stood out: Sleepless. The problem was it's a common word and plenty of other bands had already claimed it in some form. Then the slash showed up. I honestly don't remember exactly where it came from, but the second it was Sleep/less it just felt right. Different enough to own. And that was that.

As for JC, our guitarist, he was never really asked to join the band. He was told he was playing a show. He showed up, played the show, and never left. Honestly pretty on brand for how this whole thing came together.

A closet vocal session, a back lane phone call, a garage in Portage, a dead notes app, and one well placed slash. That's how Sleep/less was born.

Want to hear where we went from there?

Come find us at a show.
Brad Conrad Wiebe, Sleep/less (Sleepless)