How Music Royalty Audits Work

A royalty audit is a structured comparison. On one side, the usage and rights that should have generated income. On the other, the statements you received. The work is in making the two sides comparable at all.

The five stages

• Scope: choose a catalog segment, a set of territories and a period. Auditing everything at once is how audits stall.
• Normalise: consolidate catalog metadata into one schema, with identifiers, ownership and shares resolved.
• Detect: gather evidence of usage from the sources available for that period and territory.
• Reconcile: match detected usage to reported usage line by line, and classify every difference.
• Report: produce a prioritised list of discrepancies, each with its supporting evidence.

What you need to bring

At minimum: a catalog export with ISRC and ISWC where available, writer and publisher shares, and the royalty statements for the period under review. Cue sheets matter enormously for production music. Gaps are not a blocker — but they do shape what the audit can conclude.

Classifying discrepancies

Not every difference is a claim. A useful audit separates confirmed underreporting from ambiguous cases and from differences explained by contract terms or reporting lag. Presenting all three as one number is how audits lose credibility.

Realistic outcomes

Some findings turn into recovered revenue. Others turn into metadata fixes that stop the same leakage recurring, which is often worth more over time. And some turn out to be explained by terms you had forgotten about. All three are valid results.

No audit can guarantee recovery. Whether a discrepancy is paid depends on ownership evidence, the reporting rules of the relevant organization, territory-specific practice and your contracts.