Welcome back to Country Music 4 Ever! Have you ever wondered who gets paid when a song gets played on the radio? If your guess was the singer, you would be wrong. The singer does not get paid when their song gets played on the radio unless they wrote the song. Only the songwriter and the publisher get royalties from songs on the radio. The PROs (performing rights organizations) collect royalties and distribute them to the songwriters and publishers. In some countries both the singer and the songwriter earn royalties when their song gets radio airplay. In America that is not the case. America is one of the few countries that doesn’t pay the singer when they get airplay.

Radio stations have to get a license from the PROs that will allow them to play every song in the whole world. But once again, America does things a little different. America is one of the few countries with competing PROs. There are four different PROs in America, which means if a radio station wants to have the right to play every song in the whole world, they need a license with all four PROs.

Radio stations are obligated to provide a record of every song they’ve put on the air. The PROs collect this data and pay the songwriters and publishers for their songs that are played on the radio. Since there are thousands of radio stations, there are bound to be some mistakes when it comes to keeping record of what songs they play. Sometimes if a radio station forgets what song they played, they might just right down something like “Track 1.” Since no one knows what “Track 1” is, someone ends up losing out on money. Over the years, songwriters and publishers have missed out on millions of dollars because of mistakes radio stations made. This is not as big of a problem anymore thanks to “Soundcharts Airplay Monitoring Service.” Soundcharts keeps track of what songs are played on over 1,700 radio stations in 69 countries around the world.

Thanks for reading, I’ll be back soon!