Short version: When you sell music royalties, you give up the right to collect future income from your recordings or songs in exchange for a lump-sum payment today, typically calculated as a multiple of your trailing annual royalty income.
When you sell your music royalties, you transfer the right to collect future royalty income generated by your recordings or compositions to a buyer, in exchange for an upfront payment. Depending on how the deal is structured, this can cover mechanical, performance, streaming, sync, or a combination of income types.
The buyer steps into your shoes as the party entitled to that income going forward, while you receive the value of those future payments today, in a single transaction.
This is what sets a royalty sale apart from a full catalog sale: you can part with the income while keeping ownership of the underlying rights.
These two paths are often confused, but they're not always the same thing. A full catalog sale transfers ownership of the underlying rights themselves — the masters and/or publishing — along with everything that comes with ownership, including creative and administrative control.
A royalty sale, by contrast, is narrower: it transfers the income stream tied to those rights on a permanent basis, while ownership of the rights themselves can remain in your name. If an outright ownership sale is closer to what you have in mind, our guide to selling your music catalog walks through that path.
Royalty income is valued with the same toolkit as a full catalog, and there is no single multiple. A revenue multiple on trailing annual net royalty income is the usual starting point, but how fast the income is decaying, the discount rate applied to future earnings, terminal value, the remaining rights term, and how stable and diversified the income is all move the number. What you are pricing is the income stream itself, so its durability and predictability matter most.
Delta Juliet values qualifying royalty income using these methods in combination, with a minimum annual threshold of USD 1,000. It is the same approach we use for full catalog acquisitions, set out in detail in our guide to selling your music catalog, so there is no separate pricing model to learn.
Buyers range from large institutional royalty funds focused on established, high-earning catalogs, to boutique buyers who work with smaller, independent artists and songwriters. The right buyer for you depends less on size and more on how quickly and clearly they can move, and whether their process matches how much time and complexity you're willing to take on.
Where Delta Juliet differs is speed and access. Royalty sellers often tell us the hardest part is simply getting a buyer to respond at all. We keep it direct: you deal with us by email or phone, not a contact form or a ticket queue, and once your statements are in we commit to a concrete offer within the timeframe we promise.
Having these ready speeds up the process considerably:
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