Half the year is gone: the mid-year checklist every producer should run on July 1

Six months in. The beats you made in January are either earning or forgotten, the receipts from that plugin sale in March are somewhere in an email folder, and the split sheet you swore you'd send after that session is still a voice memo. This is the check-in that keeps July 1 from turning into a January 1 panic.

1. Reconcile your royalties across every payout source

Open every account that pays you and write the number down in one place. Don't trust the dashboard's "lifetime earnings" — pull the last six months only.

• DistroKid / TuneCore / CD Baby — download the H1 sales/streaming report as CSV. If you're deciding between them, we broke it down in DistroKid vs TuneCore and CD Baby vs DistroKid.
• PRO (ASCAP / BMI / SESAC) — check the last two quarterly statements. If a placement aired and you don't see it, that's a claim to file, not a rounding error. Refresher: ASCAP vs BMI vs SESAC.
• SoundExchange — non-interactive streaming royalties (Pandora, SiriusXM, webcasters). Most producers forget this one entirely. If you have master ownership on anything and you're not registered, that's money sitting in an escrow account with your name on it.
• Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) — if you're a songwriter and you're not registered, streaming mechanicals from the US are piling up unclaimed. Go do it today.
• YouTube Content ID — via your distributor or a third party. Check whether your uploads and any UGC using your beats are actually claimed.
• Beat marketplaces — BeatStars, Airbit, Traktrain. Export the sales log. Note which beats sold and which didn't; that's your H2 pricing signal.

If your total across all sources is meaningfully lower than you expected, the problem is almost never the platforms — it's an unregistered work, a missing split, or an ISRC that didn't propagate.

2. Chase down every unsigned split sheet

Every session from January to June that doesn't have a signed split sheet is a lawsuit waiting for the song to blow up. Make a list of every collaboration, mark which ones have signed splits, and send DocuSign / paper for the rest this week. Include:

• Songwriter share (percentages must total 100)
• Producer points on the master (if applicable)
• Publisher info for each writer
• IPI/CAE numbers
• ISRC and ISWC once assigned

If a collaborator ghosts, note it in writing with the last known agreed split. A dated email chain is worth more than nothing in a dispute.

3. Register everything you released in H1

For each release since January 1, confirm:

• Registered with your PRO (songwriter + publisher share)
• Registered with the MLC (mechanicals)
• Registered with SoundExchange if you own any of the master
• ISRC assigned and ingested by your distributor
• If it was a sync placement — cue sheet filed by the production company (chase them, they forget)

The 90-day window after release is when registration is easiest. After that you're doing back-claims, which get paid late and sometimes not at all.

4. Total your deductible expenses now, not in April

Producers routinely underclaim by thousands because they can't find receipts in April. Do this in one sitting:

• Gear — interfaces, mics, controllers, monitors, headphones, cables, stands
• Software — DAWs, plugins, sample subscriptions (Splice, Tracklib, Loopcloud), storage (Dropbox, iCloud, Backblaze)
• Education — courses, masterclasses, coaching, books
• Studio — rent on a dedicated space, or the home-office percentage of your rent/utilities if you qualify
• Travel — mileage or transit to sessions, hotels for shows or writing camps
• Marketing — ads, PR, playlist pitching services, cover art, video
• Contract labor — mixers, mastering engineers, session players, vocalists you paid
• Fees — distributor annual fees, PRO membership, LLC filing, accountant

Pull the receipts from Gmail (from:receipt OR subject:invoice after:2026/01/01), your card statements, and any app store subscription histories. Dump them in one folder or a spreadsheet. Future-you saves a full weekend.

5. Set aside tax money before you spend it

If you're a US producer and you're self-employed, you owe quarterly estimated taxes. Q2 was due June 15. Q3 is due September 15. Rough rule: set aside 25–30% of net income (income minus expenses) in a separate account you don't touch. If you missed Q2, pay it now to reduce the underpayment penalty — it accrues by the day.

Non-US: check your local equivalent. UK Self Assessment payments on account, Canadian quarterly installments, EU VAT thresholds if you're selling beats direct — the mechanics differ but the discipline is identical.

6. Back up your sessions and stems

If your drive died right now, what would you lose? Do the check today:

• All active project folders backed up to an external drive AND a cloud service
• Stems and instrumentals bounced for every released track (labels ask, sync supervisors ask, remixers ask — they always ask months later)
• Sample packs and plugin installers stored somewhere you can redownload from
• License files for paid samples and plugins in a folder titled "licenses" so you can prove clearance if it ever matters (see sample clearance)

The 3-2-1 rule still works: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite.

7. Look at the six-month numbers and adjust

Once the money and the receipts are in one place, ask three questions:

1. Which revenue stream actually paid? If 80% came from beat sales and 5% came from streaming, your H2 marketing should reflect that, not what Twitter says you should be doing.
2. Which expenses didn't earn? That plugin bundle you used twice. The playlist pitching service that returned nothing. Cut them.
3. What's the one skill or asset that would move H2 the most? Learning to mix your own vocals. Building a real drum library. Getting on one sync roster. Pick one and put it on the calendar.

8. The 20-minute weekly habit that makes next July 1 easy

The reason mid-year check-ins hurt is that they're the first time all year you looked at the numbers. Fix it with a recurring calendar block: 20 minutes every Sunday to log receipts, note session splits, and update a single running spreadsheet. Do it for the second half of 2026 and next January's tax prep takes an afternoon instead of a week.

The short version

Money you earned, money you spent, paperwork on the songs, backups on the drives, and 25% of the net in a separate account. Everything else is optional. Do this today and H2 gets to be about music instead of admin.