For Songwriters
How Songwriter Royalties from Licensing Work
By the Starchild Music team · October 3, 2026 · 6 min read
The short answer
On Starchild, songwriters earn a 50% share of every license their songs sell — from $30 song licenses to $895 stems packages and every exclusive term — tracked per-sale in a live ledger and paid out through self-serve withdrawals once the balance reaches $50. This marketplace share is separate from (and stacks with) performance royalties your PRO collects when licensed recordings get streamed, broadcast, or performed.
"How do I actually get paid?" is the least romantic and most important question in songwriting. For marketplace licensing the answer is unusually clean — a fixed share, a visible ledger, a self-serve payout — but it sits inside a bigger royalty picture worth understanding whole. Here's the money, end to end.
The marketplace share: 50% of every sale
When your song sells any license on Starchild — a $30 song license, a $40 personalization, a $50 instrumental package, an exclusive term, a stems package — half the sale is yours. Not half of a mystery "net" defined in an appendix: the split is half the sale price, with payment-processing costs the only deduction from your share. Ten songs selling two licenses a month at the entry tier is real recurring income; one stems package is a car payment.
Where you see it: the live ledger
Every sale lands in your partner dashboard as it happens — which song, which license type, what it sold for, your share — with running totals per song. The per-type detail matters strategically: a song selling instrumentals is telling you artists want to record it; a song accumulating exclusive interest is telling you it anchors releases. Your catalog's data is A&R feedback you'd otherwise pay for.
Getting paid: self-serve withdrawals
Earnings accumulate in your balance, and once it reaches $50 you trigger a withdrawal from your dashboard; the transfer runs through Stripe to your bank. Transaction fees come out of the earning they're attached to (the marketplace doesn't subsidize card costs, but it doesn't add margins on them either), and your balance history stays permanently auditable against your sales ledger. No invoices, no chasing, no "accounting periods" — the ledger is the accounting.
The stack: PRO royalties ride on top
Marketplace earnings are one layer. When artists release their licensed recordings, your composition starts its second income life: streams, radio, TV, and live performances of their record generate performance royalties collected by your PRO for you — because you're still the writer on every certificate. This is the compounding case for licensing: each license sold is both immediate income and a new recording out in the world working for your publishing. One song, ten adaptive renditions, many artists, two royalty streams each — that's the arithmetic that makes a catalog a pension.