How you get paid

Where the money comes from, why a stream is worth what it is, how splits work, and the tax that catches Indian artists — including the form that halves US withholding.

15 min read · checked August 2026

One song, four different pots of money
Why a stream is worth what it is
Why the money is slow
Splits
US tax withholding — the one worth ten minutes
The Indian side
Getting it out

One song, four different pots of money

They are paid by different people, on different clocks, and we collect only one of them.

The money	What it pays for	Who collects it
Recording royalties	Your master — the actual recording — being streamed and downloaded	Us. This is what appears in your earnings here.
Mechanical and performance royalties	The song — the melody and the words — being streamed, broadcast or performed	IPRS, and only if the writers have joined and registered the work. Not us.
Sound recording performance	Your recording played in public — shops, restaurants, radio, events	RMPL and similar bodies in India. SoundExchange for non-interactive US services.
Sync	Your music used in film, television or advertising	Negotiated deal by deal. Nobody collects it passively.

If you wrote the song and you are not an IPRS member, one of these four is simply not reaching you. No distributor collects composition royalties automatically — this is true of every distributor, not a limitation of ours. The money does not sit waiting indefinitely either. It is the most commonly lost income in independent music.

Joining IPRS, as a writer

One-time fee of ₹1,200 for an author, composer or legal heir. ₹2,200 for a publisher. No annual fee.
You need at least one published work — for non-film music, something released on streaming or on YouTube counts.
PAN is mandatory, plus address proof, a photo and bank details.
Processing takes around 45 working days.
Distributions happen at least four times a year — June, September, December and March. Minimum payout ₹100 for members.
If nobody has registered a publisher, the default split is 50% composer, 50% lyricist. With a publisher it is 25 / 25 / 50.

IPRS covers both performing and mechanical rights in India. That is different from the United States, where those are split between a performing rights organisation and a separate mechanical body — so an Indian writer has one registration to make, not two.

Why a stream is worth what it is

There is no per-stream rate. Not a secret one, not a low one — the concept does not exist.

Spotify states directly that it does not pay by a per-play or per-stream rate. What happens instead: all the subscription and advertising revenue from a given country goes into a pool for that country, and each rights holder receives the share of that pool matching their share of streams there. Your rate is an outcome, not an input.

Which is why the same song pays differently every month, and why the same play is worth different amounts depending on which country the listener is in and whether they pay for the service. An Indian stream and a US stream are not the same money, and it is not a small difference.

Spotify pays around $0.003 to $0.005 per stream.

No platform publishes a per-stream rate, and Spotify explicitly says it does not operate one. Every source carrying those numbers is a blog or a calculator citing another blog. The nearest thing to an official figure is Spotify's own: in 2025, one million streams generated roughly $11,000 globally. That is an average across every country and tier, not a rate — but at least it has a source.

A track needs at least 1,000 streams in the previous twelve months to earn anything on Spotify. Below that it is outside the royalty pool entirely. There is also a minimum number of unique listeners, which Spotify deliberately does not publish so it cannot be gamed. Eligibility is recalculated monthly, so a track can qualify, drop out, and qualify again.

Apple has published one figure, ever: an average of $0.01 per play on individual paid plans in 2020. It has not been updated since, and Apple notes it includes the publisher's share — so it is not what reaches an artist. Useful as a scale marker, not a planning number.

One genuinely encouraging Indian figure, from Spotify's own reporting on 2024: close to half of everything Indian artists earned on Spotify came from listeners outside India. If you are making music in an Indian language, the audience is not only here.

Why the money is slow

A stream happens. The store counts it, closes its month, and reports to us — how long that takes is not something any store publishes. We reconcile what arrives, apply splits, and pay out. Recording royalties typically reach an artist two to four months after the streams that earned them.

Composition royalties are much slower, and this surprises people badly. Societies run several quarters behind, and when money has to travel between societies in different countries it routinely takes twelve to eighteen months. The recording money and the songwriting money for the very same stream arrive months apart, from different payers, in different statements.

So a quiet first statement is not a sign that nothing happened. It is a sign the reporting has not caught up yet — and if you write your own songs, half the money for that period has not even started moving.

Splits

Two different things get split, in two different places, and mixing them up is how people fall out.

	Recording split	Songwriting split
What it divides	The money we pay on the master	The song itself
Where it is recorded	Here, on the release	At IPRS, when the work is registered
Who is in it	Whoever the parties agreed owns the recording — performers, producer, whoever funded it	The composer and the lyricist, and only them
If nobody sets it	Whatever the uploader entered	IPRS defaults — 50/50 composer and lyricist

Agree splits before the release goes out, in writing. Split changes are not retroactive anywhere in this industry. Money already paid on the old percentages has gone, and with composition royalties running a year behind, a dispute discovered later is money moving through two separate pipelines on two different clocks. It cannot be cleanly unwound.

The conversation people avoid is short and it is much easier before anyone has been paid. Who owns the recording, in what proportions. Who wrote the music, who wrote the words. Write it down, even in an email between you.

US tax withholding — the one worth ten minutes

The default is 30%. With one form it is 15%. Indian artists lose the difference every year by not filing it.

Money from US listeners is US-source income, and US law requires tax withheld at source on royalties paid to someone outside the country. The statutory rate is 30%. The India–US tax treaty reduces it to 15% — but only if you have filed the form claiming it.

	Detail
The form	W-8BEN — for individuals. There is a different form for companies.
Where it goes	To whoever is paying you. Not to the IRS. You give it to us, and we hold it.
The treaty article	Article 12. The rate is 15% — not 0%, and not 10%.
How long it lasts	From the date you sign it to the end of the third following calendar year. Signed any time in 2026, it runs to 31 December 2029.
If anything changes	Tell us within 30 days and sign a new one. Taking a US address counts as a change.
If you do not file it	30% withheld instead of 15%. You are giving away half of your US earnings for a form.

You need a US tax number (ITIN) to claim the treaty rate.

You do not. US regulations let a beneficial owner give the tax number issued by their own country instead, provided that country has a treaty with the US — and India does. Your PAN goes on the form, in the foreign tax identifying number field. No ITIN application, no Form W-7. One page on the IRS website still suggests otherwise and appears not to have been updated; the regulation and the form's own instructions both permit it.

Only the US share of your earnings is exposed to this. Royalties are sourced by where the music is used, so what you earn from Indian, European or other listeners is not US-source income and is not withheld on. If someone tells you 30% is coming off everything, that is wrong.

Whatever is withheld is reported on a Form 1042-S, issued even when the treaty reduces the tax to nothing. Keep it — it is your evidence when you claim credit for that tax in India.

The Indian side

General information, and it changed this year. This is the section where you need your accountant, not a website.

Two things changed in 2026. The Income-tax Act 1961 was repealed on 1 April 2026 and replaced by the Income-tax Act 2025 — so the section numbers in older guides are gone. And India's export and foreign-exchange regulations are replaced from 1 October 2026. Anything you read on this written before 2026 needs checking before you rely on it.

GST

Licensing your music to a distributor outside India, and being paid in foreign currency, will normally be an export of services — which is zero-rated, meaning you charge no GST on it.
Zero-rating is not automatic. It runs either through a Letter of Undertaking filed before exporting, or by paying the tax and reclaiming it.
Registration becomes compulsory above ₹20 lakh of turnover in a year (₹10 lakh in the special category states). The higher ₹40 lakh threshold applies only to goods and does not help a royalty earner.
Below that, a notification exempts you from having to register just because your supply crosses a state or national border — without it, every artist earning anything at all would have to register.
The forex has to actually arrive, and within the permitted period. Keep the evidence that it did.

Tax deducted at source

When an Indian payer — an Indian label, an Indian sub-distributor, IPRS — pays royalties to a resident artist, TDS applies. Under the new Act it is section 393, at 10% for royalties generally, with a lower 2% rate for consideration relating to distribution or exhibition of cinematograph films, above an annual threshold of ₹50,000. A distributor paying you from outside India is not an Indian deductor and does not deduct this.

Getting credit for the US tax

The treaty obliges India to give you credit for income tax you paid in the United States. The mechanism is Form 67, filed with a certificate or statement evidencing the foreign tax — your 1042-S. The chain is: 15% withheld in the US, 1042-S issued, gross royalty declared in your Indian return, Form 67 filed, credit given.

On the Form 67 deadline: the rule was relaxed in 2022, and it is now the end of the assessment year rather than the return due date. The Income Tax Department's own user manual for the form still states the old deadline and appears not to have been updated. Your accountant should work from the rule, not the manual.

Foreign currency coming in

Money arriving from abroad is a foreign exchange receipt and there are rules about declaring it and bringing it in within a set period. Your bank will ask for a purpose code when the money lands. Confirm the right code with your bank rather than taking one from the internet — sources disagree, and that code is part of what evidences your GST export position later.

Everything in this section is general information gathered from published law, not tax advice, and parts of it are mid-transition this year. Get a chartered accountant. The cost of one is small next to what is at stake in getting the GST position or the foreign tax credit wrong.

Getting it out

Two costs sit between a balance and your bank account, and only one of them is visible.

The transfer fee. Domestic transfers cost around a dollar. International wires run to $20–$28 across the industry. On a small quarter, a wire can eat the entire payout.
The exchange rate. Nobody publishes their margin on converting dollars to rupees — not us, not any distributor, not the payment rails everyone uses. It is usually the larger of the two costs.

Which leads to the only real advice here: let it accumulate and withdraw less often. Four withdrawals a year instead of twelve is the same money minus eight transfer fees. And when a payment lands, compare what you received against the day's interbank rate — that difference is the FX cost, and it is worth knowing even though it is nobody's line item.

Where this comes from

Checked August 2026. Rules change and pages move — if something here no longer matches what you find, tell us and we will correct it.

General information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Where money or rights are at stake — a cover licence, a dispute, your tax position — get a professional who can look at your actual situation.