Music & Money!
It’s fair to say that songwriters are better off spending their time being creative – writing songs!
The person, as they say, that ‘takes care of business’ is the Music Publisher. The main role of a modern publisher is collecting royalties from national royalty systems around the globe on behalf of writers and themselves.
Publishing consists of two main activities:
Administration: Finding users, issueing licenses, collecting license fees from commercial venues and broadcasters, foreign royalty organisations and from sync licenses, sheet music etc and paying the writer.
Publishing Services: pitching material to potential users to maximise earnings for the publisher and writer(s).
When a Music Publisher has a deal with a songwriter the publisher is taking on the obligations to do these things hence they ‘administer’ the songs.
The publisher splits income 50/50 with their writer (sheet music and performance money is split on different ratio). So 50% (the publishers share) is to cover overhead and profit and 50% goes to the writer.
What monies does the publisher collect?
Mechanical royalties – that’s money paid by a record company for the right to use a song in recording. Basically the publisher issues a license that will provide them a royalty (pennies) for each record manufactured and distributed.
Public Performance royalties are collected via the performing right sociaties (ASCAP, BMI SESAC in USA, PRS in UK and various eqivilants around the globe). These Societies act as agents for the Publishers collecting fees having granted permission to play songs on radio, TV, in nightclubs, amusment parks, live events and concert halls.
Other or whats called Secondary Publisher Income is obtained from, print (sheet music and folios), synchronisation (song/music used in Films, TV, videos etc), and foreign monies – smaller publishers will normally use a local publisher to collect monies on its behalf in foreign territories.
Now lets be honest if you are busy writing great songs you aint gonna have time to do all that! If you want to know who gets paid for what and some of the various ways publishing deals generate money check out this video interview with Eddie DeGarmo president of EMI CMG Publishing in Nashville . . . .
