For Songwriters
How Songwriters Earn From Licensing
By the Starchild Music team · September 21, 2026 · 5 min read
The short answer
Songwriters on Starchild earn 50% of every license sale (after payment fees), tracked per song in a live sales ledger with self-serve Stripe payouts. No advances to recoup, no cross-collateralization — and the adaptive format multiplies discovery by putting each song in front of ten genres of buyers.
The traditional songwriter economy had one door: get published, get pitched, pray. The marketplace model adds a second door that stays open — list your catalog, let artists worldwide find and license your songs directly, and share in every sale without an advance to recoup.
How the money works on Starchild
Content partners list songs; every license sold — from a $30 song license to a $150 exclusive term to a stems package — carries the writer's share, tracked per song and visible in your partner dashboard's sales ledger. There's no recoupment math and no cross-collateralization: a sale is a sale.
The adaptive format quietly multiplies your surface area. Your ballad, produced in ten styles, gets auditioned by artists in ten genres — including ones you never wrote for. Songs earn from rooms their writer has never entered.
Keep your credits airtight
Every song's writers and publishers — names, PROs, IPI numbers, splits — live on the song's record and print onto every license certificate a buyer downloads. You can edit them any time from your song library, and updates flow to all past and future certificates automatically. Clean metadata is not paperwork; it's the plumbing your royalties travel through.
If you're a working writer with a catalog sitting in a drawer, the door is here. Listing is straightforward, your first songs go through a quick review, and the production pipeline turns each one into a full adaptive song — at no cost to you.