How Does Music Publishing Work?
If you are starting as a new songwriter, you may wonder how music publishing works. While it could be a long process with many basics involved, music publishing, in essence, relates to how you make money with your music. The question is, how you can start making money through your music.
Let’s look at what music publishing is, the types of copyrights and royalties you need to be aware of, and the role of music publishers.
What is Music Publishing?
Music publishing is the business to promote and monetize the musical creations of artists. Publishers not only provide a platform for the artists to receive royalties for their work but they also open doors to future opportunities. These may be in the form of performing the composition or reproducing it to monetize it further.
Types of Music Copyrights
It is important to understand the types of copyrights while learning how music publishing works. Each song an artist writes stores in two forms: composition and sound recording. Hence, there are two sets of copyrights associated with a song, known as the composition rights and the master recording rights.
Here’s what the split of copyrights into each part means:
1. Composition Right
Copyrights, relating to raw music, include work in the form of melody, harmony, and sometimes the lyrics. It is the work you cannot listen to yet and exists in writing only.
2. Master Recording Rights
These copyrights pertain to the produced or recorded form of the musical work by an artist. You can listen to this through a CD player, YouTube, Spotify, or any other platform.
Types of Music Royalties
To understand how music publishing works, the next step is knowing the compensation. Just like any other industry, the music sector is subject to regulations. Therefore, the mechanism that regulates royalties’ calculation can vary from country to country. While the rules may differ, the core operation of royalties across the globe is standard.
We can find three types of music royalties. Let’s have a look at each of them in detail.
1. Mechanical Royalties
Songwriters receive mechanical royalties from third parties wanting to reproduce or distribute the song. The name "mechanical" came from the past when the distributors created a medium to carry compositions.
Today, each time a person plays the song using any platform, the artist receives mechanical royalty as the song technically gets reproduced.
2. Public Performance Royalties
Another compensation to artists comes in the form of public performance royalties whenever they perform the musical work in the public. Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) exist worldwide that collect, manage, and distribute these royalties to artists.
3. Synchronization License Fee
Every time a movie, a radio, a TV show, or a video game wants to use the song in their content, they need to get permission from the copyright owners. If permitted, the songwriter receives a fee for allowing to use of the song in third-party content.
The Role of Music Publisher
Now that you’re familiar with royalties, the next step to understand how music publishing works is to know music publishers' role. Someone has to maintain a check on the royalties to ensure proper recording and payout to the artists. This process comes under the publishing administration and is the fundamental role of a music publisher.
If you’re wondering how these music publishers make money, know that they take half of the stake in the track. Meaning the songwriter assigns half of the copyright to the music publisher, who divides the royalties accordingly. Besides, they charge a licensing fee for the contract with the artist.