Neighboring Rights: The Royalty Most Indian Artists Miss
Neighboring rights are royalties paid to performers and recording owners when a recording is publicly performed or broadcast — on radio, satellite radio, cable, or non-interactive streaming. They are called "neighboring" because they sit next to the author's copyright in the song: they belong to the people who performed and paid for the recording, not the people who wrote the composition. For Indian artists, this is the most commonly missed royalty stream — and it can be substantial.
How neighboring rights work
When a recording is played on radio or a non-interactive service, two sets of rights are used: the composition (songwriter's right, collected by PROs like IPRS) and the recording (performer's and owner's right, collected by neighboring-rights societies). In most of the world, performers — featured artists, session musicians, and backing vocalists — earn neighboring-rights royalties from broadcast and public performance of recordings. The US is the major exception: American law does not recognise neighboring rights for terrestrial radio, only for non-interactive digital streams, collected by SoundExchange.
The SoundExchange split
In the US, SoundExchange is the only entity authorised by law to collect digital performance royalties for sound recordings. Its distribution model splits royalties 50% to the rights owner (usually the label or the artist if they own the master), 45% to the featured artist, and 5% to non-featured artists through the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund. Because independent artists usually own their own masters, both the rights-owner and featured-artist shares often flow to them — making SoundExchange registration one of the highest-return registrations an independent artist can make.
India: ISAMRA
In India, the Indian Singers and Musicians Rights Association (ISAMRA) works to protect performers' rights and collect royalties for singers and musicians when their recordings are played. ISAMRA has signed a multilateral agreement with SoundExchange and the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund to ensure performers get paid when their music is played across India and the US. Reciprocal agreements like this are how neighboring-rights money crosses borders: your home society collects abroad through partner societies, and vice versa.
What to do
If you perform on recordings — as a singer, featured artist, or session musician — register with the neighboring-rights body in your market (ISAMRA in India, SoundExchange in the US) and claim your recordings. If you only ever collect recording royalties from your distributor and publishing royalties from IPRS, you are likely missing this entire stream.
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