When the writer is gone. The royalties aren't.

In the U.S., a composition copyright lasts the life of the writer plus 70 years. Performance royalties, mechanical royalties, sync income, neighboring rights — they don't stop the day the writer dies. They keep flowing for decades. Most of them go unclaimed, because the platforms that collect those royalties don't proactively find heirs.

What goes wrong

PROs and the MLC have no mechanism for noticing that a writer has died and routing future earnings to an estate. When the writer's account stops responding — statements unopened, addresses unchanged, payments returned — the royalties don't get reassigned. They accumulate in unclaimed pools. After enough quarters of inactivity, those pools redistribute to the largest publishers by market share, not to the writer's family.

It's a quiet kind of leakage. Nobody sends a notice. The money was there; it's still there; it's just being paid to someone else.

What Doom Tide does

We help estates do four things, in order:

1. Inventory the catalog. Pull up what was actually registered at the PROs (BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, GMR) and the MLC under the deceased writer's name. Most estates don't know what was registered — the writer often didn't either. Independent songwriters in particular tend to leave a trail of partial registrations across multiple platforms.
2. Redirect future earnings. File the succession paperwork — death certificate, executor designation, letters testamentary — with every collection society where the deceased had a writer-level account. From the date the paperwork lands, future royalties flow to the estate.
3. Claim retroactive earnings. The MLC, in particular, holds unmatched mechanical royalties before they're redistributed. Black-box claims tied to the deceased's catalog are recoverable for a window that varies by source. We file those claims.
4. Register what was missed. Many independent writers never registered every work they wrote. Doom Tide's bulk-registration tooling — the same tooling we use for living writers — builds the CSVs for posthumous registration with each collection society.

Two boundaries, stated plainly. Doom Tide is not a law firm and doesn’t provide legal advice. We handle the collection-society paperwork; the estate’s probate attorney handles the will, the court filings, and anything contested. And none of the four steps above starts on a phone call — we do this work only after the estate and Doom Tide have both agreed to terms in a signed administration agreement. Until then, an intro call is just an intro call.

The complications, named honestly

Estate work is messier than living-writer administration. The complications worth knowing about up front:

• Probate has to be in some kind of order. Most PROs require letters testamentary (or a comparable court document naming the executor or administrator) before they'll change collection on a writer-level account. If the estate is still in early probate, some of the work waits.
• Some royalty streams have statute-of-limitations windows. Black-box mechanical royalties at the MLC redistribute after a defined window if unclaimed. Claims after that window are not recoverable. Earlier is better; "later" is not always still possible.
• International collection adds layers. PROs collect domestic; sub-publishers handle foreign territories. Estates with international earnings often have several separate paperwork tracks running in parallel.
• Family disagreements happen. Multiple heirs to a single catalog need a clear succession agreement before any platform can route payments. We don't mediate those agreements; we work with whatever document the estate produces.
• Self-published vs. assigned catalogs differ. If the deceased writer assigned their publishing to a third party at any point, that assignment may still be in force. Inventory always starts there.

How it works at Doom Tide

Estates are a first-class entity type on the platform — the same data model used for solo writers and bands. Two tiers:

What's actually recoverable

We don't make per-estate dollar promises before we've seen the catalog — recoverable amounts depend heavily on what the deceased writer actually published, what was already registered, and how long the account has been dormant. What we will say: between 2023 and 2026, the operator behind Doom Tide recovered $269,000+ in unclaimed royalties for 40+ independent songwriters. A meaningful share of that came from accounts where the writer was years behind on simple maintenance — the same shape as a dormant estate account. The same tools and discipline apply here.

Starting

Estate work usually starts with a conversation, not a self-serve signup. Book an intro call below. First call is free and goes over what's likely recoverable in your specific case before any commitment.