Skip to content

Better Days is out

Watch
SLEEP/less

News · April 8, 2026

The Canadian artist royalty guide

If you are a Canadian musician and you have not registered with SOCAN yet, you are leaving money uncollected every time your song plays on the radio, streams, or gets licensed in a film.

SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, is the performing rights organization. It collects two kinds of royalties.

Performance rights

A performance royalty is generated when a song is performed or broadcast in public. That includes radio, including CBC, campus, and commercial stations. It includes live shows at licensed venues, streams on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, placements in TV, film, and commercials, and background music in restaurants, bars, and shops.

SOCAN collects the fees from those businesses and broadcasters and pays the writers and publishers on the registration. If the song is not registered, that money is distributed to someone else.

Reproduction rights

In 2017 SOCAN acquired SODRAC and took on reproduction rights. That is the mechanical right, the right to reproduce the composition as a recording. Performance rights cover the song being heard. Reproduction rights cover the song being copied. Downloads, on-demand streams, a sync to YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram, and a CD or a vinyl run all sit on this side.

Most artists only think about the performance royalty. A stream can trigger both. Registering with SOCAN covers both under one roof. In the United States those rights are split across separate organizations.

How to register

  1. Create a member account at socan.com.
  2. Register as a writer, a publisher, or both.
  3. Register each song: title, co-writers, and the ownership splits.
  4. Submit a live performance log for shows at SOCAN-licensed venues.
  5. Make sure the distributor is reporting the streams.

Registration is free for songwriters. SOCAN takes an admin percentage from what it collects before it pays out. If a song is co-written, every writer needs to be a member, and the splits need to be agreed and registered before the money moves. How a band handles those splits is its own conversation.

This is the guide as it ran on the old site on April 8, 2026. The old post also offered a download by email. The list on this site is still a preview and does not send anything, so that download is not available here.