The Velocity Years
by Silvia Passiflora, Editor | Scriptaluna
April 15, 2026
In my early days of releasing music, I said yes to everything.
If a platform offered to collect royalties, I accepted. If a distributor offered to administer rights, I trusted it. The checkboxes felt like doors, and I walked through all of them.
What I did not know is that these systems do not talk to one another.
I found one of those gaps while taking down an early single.
When your music plays on internet or satellite radio, a separate performance royalty is generated for the recording itself. It sits outside your PRO, outside your distributor. A nonprofit collects it for artists and master rights holders, though only if the chain is complete. Without a direct account, or with a break in your distributor’s setup, those royalties drift into a general pool and are eventually reassigned. No alert. No notice. The clock simply runs.
I had opted into collection through a distributor. Running blind, I had mistakenly opened a redundant account with the same satellite radio rights organization. The distributor marked the recording royalty field as “N/A.” The organization never flagged it for me directly.
Years later, I had to reconstruct it backward, What I found was not fraud. It was a system with no obligation to tell me what it had not done.
What I understand now is simple. These are not one system. They are a series of agreements, each waiting for a signal that may never arrive. If you enter them out of sequence, they do not correct you.
They wait for you to somehow know what you do not know and to correct their gaps.
Independent artists are asked to build infrastructure before they are taught how it works.
The version of me who uploaded those first tracks did not fail.
She was moving at velocity, learning while building, making decisions without full visibility because that visibility is not offered at the beginning.
Today, I move differently. I do not buy bundled services — promises to extra services which may or may not be administered correctly downstream. I assign my own ISRCs. I register directly. I vet each distributor on several metrics. I build my own pipeline.
Instead of relying on a distributor's support staff to get back to me in five to seven business days, I have at least a chance of understanding forensic untangling on my own. At least I won't have to undo someone else's mistake that I paid for.
But I do not go back and correct Past Me. I thank her. She moved fast enough to reveal where the system breaks and she left enough behind for me to find it. ✨
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