Authorise your shares
Instructions for co-writers
We always recommend you register your music yourself, but if your music has been registered by your co-writer, to make sure we can collect your online royalties in full, you need to ‘authorise’ your own shares for:
- the performing right and
- the mechanical right (if you’re also an MCPS member)
This is specifically for online royalty streams, for example if your music is played on Spotify, YouTube or BBC iPlayer.
Even if your music appears under ‘My Works’ when you log into our website and has your CAE number attached to it, if you didn’t register it yourself it will not be authorised, so please follow all stages of the process below to do so.
- you registered your co-written music yourself - even if your co-writer has also registered it separately, neither of you needs to do anything else, because by each registering the music you have both automatically authorised your own shares
OR - your music is published by a music publisher, as it’s normally their responsibility to register it with us on your behalf under the terms of your publishing agreement. If you're not sure whose responsibility it is, please check with them.
Step one: confirm the music has been registered by your co-writer
If you need to check this has been done, click ‘my works’ on the member homepage or search works using your CAE number.
To learn how to register your music yourself, see our separate instructions.
Step two: authorise your shares
- go to the ‘Register or Amend my music’ page on our website
- select ‘amend an existing work’
- type in the tune code or ISWC – you can find this, as above, by clicking ‘my works’ on the member homepage or by search works using your CAE number
- when the work appears, click ‘amend’
- hit ‘next’ to reach the page ‘your interested parties’ – at this point, you’ll see the shares given to you by the member who registered the music. If the shares are not what you were expecting, you can correct them here
- hit ‘next’ to review the full details of the music
- finally, hit ‘send’
What happens next?
You’ll get a confirmation email once you’ve submitted the amendment.
Around 48 hours later you’ll get another email confirming a new tunecode, which our system has created to reflect the new registration. At this point, the music will be visible on our database with both the original and new tunecodes, which will be merged together into a single entry when we’re notified that your music has been performed.
Only after this process is completed will we be able to collect online royalties for your share in the music.
For future payment dates, see our distribution schedule.
