Featured, non-featured, session: who's actually entitled to neighbouring rights?
Across the last few posts we've covered how neighbouring rights (NR) money is calculated and why it has a shelf life if nobody claims it. But there's a more basic question sitting underneath both of those: who is actually entitled to this money in the first place?
If you're a featured artist with your name on the record sleeve or displayed on streaming services, the answer feels obvious, and mostly is. But NR isn't only paid to featured artists, and a huge number of performers who are entitled to a share have no idea they're owed anything at all. The gap between who's entitled and who's actually claiming their money is exactly the kind of thing that feeds our "how big is the unclaimed pool" conversation from earlier posts.
The basic split: rightsholder and performer
As we touched on in the royalty-calculation post, NR income is generally split between two categories: the rightsholder (typically the label or whoever commercially released the recording) and the performer(s) on that recording. It's the performer side of that split that gets complicated, because "performer" isn't a single, universally defined category; it covers several different roles, each treated differently depending on the territory.
Featured performers
This is the most straightforward category: the artist(s) the recording is credited to, the name that appears on the release. Featured performers are almost universally recognised as entitled to a share of NR income, and in most cases they're the performers most likely to already be registered with societies as performers on recordings, simply because labels and collection societies tend to prioritise getting the credited artist's details on file.
Guest featured performers
This is where it starts to get a little more complex. Guest featured performers are those who contributed a performance to the recording, with their name credited as “featuring” or “feat.” on the track but who aren’t signed to the label of release, or members of the “band” as marketed. Think of “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra. Kimbra is a guest feature on Gotye’s recording in this instance. This class of guest feature can generate a different share of royalties than the “contracted” featured artist at NR societies. How the royalties are split society by society we will tackle in another post…
Session musicians
Session musicians occupy the most commonly misunderstood category of all. These are the performers hired to play on a recording without any ongoing billing or credit as part of the artist, for example a session drummer, a string section or a backing vocalist brought in for a day's work. A lot of session musicians assume that because they were paid a one-off session fee at the time of recording, that's the end of their financial interest in the track. In most territories, it isn't. Depending on local rules, session performers can be entitled to a share of ongoing NR income generated by broadcast and public performance of that recording, entirely separate from whatever they were paid to record it.
This is a genuinely significant gap in awareness. Session musicians are, as a group, probably the single largest population of NR-eligible performers who have never registered for anything, simply because nobody ever told them they might be owed money for work they consider long finished.
Conductors and executive (studio) producers
This can be the most complicated category of all. Generally speaking, to qualify for NR royalties, a performer must have made an audible contribution to a recording, which could be anything from a handclap to pressing keys, pulling stops and pushing foot pedals on a pipe organ. However, there is a “performer” category where an individual directs the performance of others while the recording is taking place, in such a way as to shape the recording significantly. The most obvious of these is a conductor, without whom an orchestra would lose precision and musical interpretation. Then there are executive producers who have a similar role in shaping the recording, musical expression and performance in the studio. This is the murkiest of all categories because recording and mastering engineers do not qualify for NR so the role is quite narrow and not accepted in many territories. Think of someone like Rick Rubin, who brings a signature feel to recordings he produces; you can say “this is a Rick Rubin track” when you hear it. In certain situations, a studio technician/producer can obtain signed instruction from the featured artist (usually in a society template) to receive a portion of the artist share of NR.
Why the territory you're in changes the answer
We've said this in earlier posts about rates and calculation methods, and it holds just as true here: there's no single global standard for who counts as a performer for NR purposes. Some territories draw a clean line between featured and non-featured performers and treat both similarly; others have specific carve-outs or different treatment for session musicians; some require a minimum threshold of creative contribution before a performance qualifies at all; some territories pay performers more if they’ve played multiple instruments on a recording. If you've performed on recordings that get used internationally, your entitlement can genuinely differ from one country's collection society to the next, which is exactly why "am I owed anything?" doesn't have a single universal answer, it depends on where the recording was used, not just what role you played on it.
Why this matters for registration
The practical upshot of all this is that entitlement and registration are two different things, and the gap between them is where money gets left unclaimed. Being legally entitled to a share of NR income doesn't put money in your account automatically, you (or your recording) still need to be identifiable, matched to the correct usage, and registered with the relevant collection societies. For featured artists this tends to happen reasonably reliably, because labels and metadata systems are built around crediting the primary artist. For non-featured, session performers, it very often doesn't happen unless the performer actively claims on the recording.
If you've played on other people's tracks, as a guest, a string arrangement, backing vocals, anything short of being the credited artist, it's worth asking a simple question: have you ever actually registered a claim as a performer on that recording anywhere? For a lot of working musicians, the honest answer is no, not because there's nothing to claim, but because nobody ever flagged that there might be.
The takeaway
Neighbouring rights was never intended to be exclusively for the artist whose name is on the cover. Featured artists, guest performers and session musicians all have a legitimate claim, and the recordings most likely to have unclaimed money attached are often the ones where a session player's contribution was never properly credited or registered in the first place. If that sounds like it might describe some of your own back catalogue, as a performer on someone else's record, not just your own, it's worth checking rather than assuming. As always, get in touch if you'd like help working out where you stand.
