Music-related rights are split into two main sections:

An easy way to understand this is that a song (Publishing rights) can only be written once, but can be recorded (Master Rights) many times.

Whenever a piece of music is played on radio, TV, performed in a venue, or streamed/downloaded, etc, it earns a royalty for whoever wrote the music or lyrics. Collecting societies, like GEMA, collect and distribute these royalties. But if a work is not registered it is not possible to assign any royalties to it. The GEMA Work Declaration allows you to register your "work" so that you can receive any Publishing royalties that you might be owed. The GEMA Work Declaration therefore opens up a second stream of revenue for your music, which is why we encourage it and have integrated it into the MusicHub app.

If you have already been registering your works directly with GEMA, then you will most likely understand this process. In that case, it is simply important to know that the GEMA Work Declaration feature offered by MusicHub replicates the process that you could also do directly with GEMA.

First, you must be a member of GEMA. If that is the case, then you can submit a GEMA Work Declaration as soon as your track has been submitted as a part of a release - i.e. the track status must be "In Review", "Returned", "Approved", or "Live". Once this is done, head to the tracks board.

When submitting a GEMA Work Declaration we recommend to switch to the list view:

Now you will see that, for any of your submitted tracks, a work declaration icon will appear which, when clicked, will take you to the "Work Declaration" tab:

The first thing you will notice is the option to select that you have already registered a composition with GEMA. If this is the case you simply can tick the box ‘I have registered my work via the GEMA portal’ and then enter your work number:

If you have not yet registered your work with GEMA, you can continue with the registration process:

As you scroll down the page, you will find that the fields for work title, language, primary genre and duration will already be pre-filled with the metadata from the track. If, however, the title contains special characters like umlauts, these will have been automatically adjusted, as the GEMA system does not accept such characters.

When you come to the "Authors & Royalties" section, you might see one or more 'alerts'. This is because, in this version of the GEMA Work Registration, it is only possible to register work for authors that are already registered with GEMA - and it is also not possible yet to register works that include a publisher. So if data in the registration form includes a publisher or an unregistered author, you will need to delete these roles before you can submit the registration. (But don't worry, this will not affect the data of the track you are releasing)

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Next, there is also the option to include instrumentation and the performers of the track: (this section is optional)

After you have confirmed and submitted the declaration, it will be assigned a registration number and will have the status "Pending". It usually takes GEMA a couple of days to approve a works registration. Once the registration is successfully processed by GEMA, and MusicHub has received confirmation, the status will be replaced by the GEMA Work Number assigned to it.

At this point, you will also see a green tick appear on the track's card in the "Track Board" view:

Once you've successfully registered your work declaration at GEMA, you will be able to earn income for the underlying composition. While you can do this via MusicHub, the income attributed to the composition will not be displayed in the MusicHub app. MusicHub only receives the royalties for the sound recording, while GEMA receives and distributes all royalties associated with the composition.

You will find these royalties in your yearly GEMA reports. We know this is not ideal, please bear with us while we’re looking for a more transparent solution.

You can make adjustments to your GEMA Work Declaration, for example, to enrich it with additional metadata or to make corrections. However, this must be done via GEMA and cannot be done via the MusicHub app.