What are Royalty Splits?
If you work with a collaborator on your music, you may have an agreement with them where they are owed a percentage of royalties earned once your track(s) are released.
Instead of having to manually calculate those earnings and pay them to your collaborators yourself once you've received your royalties, you can instead set up Release Splits or Track Splits in your Identity Music dashboard.
Once Splits are set up, the percentage of royalties owed to your collaborator(s) will automatically be diverted to their Payee account, rather than you having to step in to intervene manually each month.
How to add Royalty Splits in your Identity Music dashboard
Royalty Splits are available to anyone with a distribution agreement with Identity Music. There is no additional cost for using Royalty Splits and they're simple to set up.
Step One: find the Release you want to add Royalty Splits to
Log into your Identity Music dashboard, navigate to Catalogue, then click into the Release you want to add splits to.
Step Two: navigate to Royalty Splits
In your Release, click into Rights in the left-hand column, then into Royalty Splits:
Step Three: add Royalty Splits
Once you've clicked into Royalty Splits, you'll be able to see any existing Splits set up at Release or Track level.
To add new Splits, click 'Add Splits' in the top right corner. Once you've done so, you'll see a screen showing the tracks in your Release and another 'Add Split' button.
Click that button, then you'll see a modal to add details:
Add a Payee name (this should be the legal name of your collaborator) and an active email address - make sure you input the email address accurately, as your Payee will receive an invitation to their Payee portal to this address.
In the 'Add To' field, choose whether you want Release-level or Track-level Splits.
If you choose All Tracks here, the same Splits will apply to every track in your Release. If you need to assign different Splits across different tracks, choose Specific Tracks instead.
Choosing Specific Tracks will show a dropdown where you can select one or multiple tracks in the Release to add this Payee to.
Once you've chosen which track(s) Splits are being added to, the final thing to do is to assign their royalty share percentage.
Step Four: confirm your Royalty Splits are accurate
Once you've added a Royalty Split, you'll be taken back to the overall Splits view to confirm the Royalty Splits are accurate.
Remember: all Royalty Splits must add up to 100%, so that 100% of the revenue for the Release is assigned to a Payee.
If, for example, you've added a collaborator with a 70% Royalty Split, you will now need to add additional Splits to bring the total up to 100% - even if the remaining 30% is going to you.
Follow the same process as above for all additional Payees, until the total is 100%. You can add as many Payees as you need on each Track or Release.
Once you're happy the Splits are accurate, click 'Create Splits' at the bottom of the page, confirm you have reviewed the Splits, and then you're done!
If you have anything else that you would like to speak to our team about please do get in touch with our Client Management Team.