How Music Royalties Actually Work in India (and Who Gets Paid)

When a hit song plays on the radio in a Mumbai cab, streams on a phone in Patna, and blares from a wedding speaker in Coimbatore on the same evening, several different people quietly earn money from it — and most of them are not the singer you're humming along to. Understanding how music royalties work in India is the difference between an artist who builds wealth from one good song and one who signs it away for a single cheque. This is the part of the entertainment business almost no one explains clearly, so here it is in plain language.

One song, three separate rights

The single most important idea is that a recorded song is not one thing — it is three stacked copyrights, each owned and earning separately:

1. The composition — the tune and melody, owned by the composer.
2. The lyrics — the words, owned by the lyricist.
3. The sound recording — the specific master recording, usually owned by the music label or producer who funded it.

The composition and lyrics together are the "underlying work"; the recording is the "master." When you stream a track, you are technically using the master, but the underlying work is being used too. That layered structure is exactly why a song generates multiple royalty streams flowing to different pockets — and why so many artists, not realising this, only ever claim one of them.

The 2012 law that changed everything for writers

For decades, Indian composers and lyricists routinely signed away all rights to a producer for a flat fee. The song could earn for thirty years; they earned once. The Copyright (Amendment) Act of 2012 rewrote that bargain.

Its landmark provision: authors of literary and musical works retain a right to an equal share of royalties from any use of their song other than theatrical exhibition of the film. Crucially, this right is non-assignable and cannot be waived — any contract clause that tries to strip it away is void. So even after a lyricist hands a film song to a producer, every time that song plays on radio, television, a streaming app, in a mall or at a live event, the writer is legally owed a cut. This is the single most powerful protection an Indian songwriter has, and many still don't invoke it.

Meet the collecting societies: IPRS, PPL and ISRA

No individual artist can chase thousands of cafes, FM stations and apps for tiny payments. That job belongs to copyright societies, which license users in bulk, collect the money, and distribute it to members. Three names matter most:

• IPRS (Indian Performing Right Society) — represents composers, lyricists and music publishers. If you wrote or composed, this is your society. It licenses radio, TV, streaming platforms and public venues, then pays authors and publishers their share.
• PPL and RMPL — represent the owners of the sound recording, mostly labels. When a venue or broadcaster wants to play the actual master, they license it here.
• ISRA (Indian Singers' Rights Association) — represents the performers, primarily the singers whose voices are on the track. Performers have their own distinct right to be paid when a recording is played publicly.

Think of it this way: play one song in a restaurant and, in principle, IPRS, PPL and ISRA can each have a claim — one for the writing and composing, one for the recording, one for the singing. They are not rivals dividing one pie; they collect for genuinely different rights.

How the money actually reaches an artist

Here is the flow that trips up newcomers. Streaming royalties for the recording reach you through a digital distributor — the service that uploads your music to Spotify, Apple Music, JioSaavn, YouTube Music and the rest. The platform pays the recording owner per stream, the distributor takes its cut, and the rest lands in your account. Simple, and most indie artists know this part.

What they miss is the second cheque. The author royalties for the composition and lyrics do not come from the distributor — they come from IPRS, but only if you are a member and your works are registered. The performer's share comes from ISRA, again only with membership. Societies deduct administrative costs (IPRS keeps up to a modest percentage to run itself) and typically distribute the rest quarterly, based on usage reports from broadcasters and platforms. Miss the membership step, and that money simply sits uncollected or flows to others.

Why courts keep getting involved

The reason royalties feel like a constant battlefield is that big users — FM radio networks, telecom companies selling caller tunes, large broadcasters — have repeatedly resisted paying the author share, arguing they had already licensed the recording. Indian courts have increasingly sided with the creators, affirming that IPRS is entitled to collect royalties for the underlying works even when the recording is separately licensed. Each such ruling strengthens the principle that using a song means paying for the writing and composing inside it, not just the master. For working musicians, these judgments are not abstract law; they are the legal muscle that turns a song into a long-term income stream.

A practical checklist for independent musicians

If you make original music in India, treat royalties as a system to set up, not luck to hope for:

• Register your works and keep clean records of who wrote, composed, produced and sang each track, plus the splits agreed in writing.
• Join IPRS as an author or publisher member if you write or compose — the entry fee is nominal and it unlocks broadcast, public-performance and streaming author royalties.
• Join ISRA if you are the performing singer, so you collect the performer's share.
• Use a distributor to reach streaming platforms, and read the cut it takes before signing.
• Never sign away the 2012 royalty right — and remember that even if a contract tries to, that clause is unenforceable.
• Read every assignment contract for the phrase "royalties"; flat-fee buyouts that ignore future earnings are where most artists lose money.

Why this matters more every year

As India's streaming audience swells into the hundreds of millions and live events, retail and digital advertising all hunger for music, the value sitting inside the author share keeps rising. The artists who will benefit are not necessarily the most famous — they are the ones who understood that a song is three rights, joined the right society for each, and refused to surrender the protections the law already hands them. The next time you hear a track everywhere at once, remember: somewhere, a writer who set this up correctly is getting paid three times over, while one who didn't is getting paid not at all.