Wendy Day breaks down music publishing for independent artists: you own your composition automatically, but need to decide between co-publishing deals (publisher takes a cut) or administration deals (you keep 100% ownership, pay a fee). She warns newcomers away from co-publishing, recommends Songtrust for collecting royalties, and stresses that publishing is the music business's primary revenue source.
Chapters
Hi guys, welcome to 2020 Vision. I kind of laughed at myself today because I woke up saying, oh, I'm gonna make a 5-minute video and teach you guys everything about publishing that I possibly can, when it took me like 10 years to learn everything that was about publishing. So I'm gonna make a short snippet video talking about publishing, and what I want you to do is go and and research this. Learn as much as you can about publishing because this is where the money is in the music business. Publishing is the ownership of the words and the music in music. So when you put a pen to paper, or you type out your lyrics on your phone, or you sit in front of a machine and start making a beat you automatically own the publishing. You're creating that. As long as you're not sampling or jacking the lyric or the song or the idea from another person, you have full ownership of what you're making if you're working alone. If you're working with somebody else, you're going to do a split sheet and figure out who owns what, right? Because you saw the video a couple days ago. Publishing is the actual ownership of the words and music. And the publishing you automatically own as soon as you make the song. So to set up a publishing company, all you really need to do is set up an entity where you store your words or your music or your songs, right? And then once you have that entity, you're going to name it, and most people name it based on what ASCAP or BMI accept as your name because every name has to be be different, and there's already hundreds of thousands of artists affiliated with ASCAP and BMI and SESAC. So most people name their publishing company whatever ASCAP or BMI— like, um, uh, Pimp C, his, his, uh, publishing company was called Pimp in My Pen, which was just a really cool name. So as you have your publishing company, you're going to do a deal with an administrator or a bigger publishing company to collect your money for you. Now, publishing deals, you've heard of them. What they are is someone comes along, they see your value, they think that you're an amazing writer or an amazing beatmaker, and they want in financially. So they will make you an offer to do a publishing deal with you where they own a percentage of your publishing for a certain period of time, like 3 to 5 years, and they'll give you an advance against your royalties in order to get you to do that deal with them. And then for the rest of the existence of that song, of the copyright of that song, they will have ownership of whatever percentage deal that they struck with you. So let's say it's a co-pub deal that's a 50/50 split. And I hope, I hope I'm not confusing you. And even if I am or not, you should go and read as much as you can about publishing. Don Passman has a book called Everything You Need to Know About the Music Industry, and it's got a really great section on publishing. And if you don't have money, go to the fucking Barnes Noble and just sit down and just read that section, because you really need to understand publishing. So let's say you do a 50/50 co-pub deal and you do the deal for $100,000, right? Because you're brand new and you don't know any better. So you've done a $100,000 deal. That means you have to deliver a certain amount of songs to that co-publisher in order to collect all of that money. They may give you half of the money up front, and it may be for 5 songs, it may be for 10 songs, it might be for 50 songs. But that is— let's say it's for 5 songs, that's 5 100% ownership of songs. So if you're just the producer and you only own 50% of the song, instead of 5 songs, that's really 10 because you're only owning 50% of each song. So 5 100% songs is 10 50% songs. I'm not a fan of co-pub deals. I understand why artists do them because they need money, but every publisher I know out there has told artists, we will help shop your songs, we will help get you placements, we will get you onto TV shows, into movies, onto video games. And very, very few do that. They just really sit back and collect your money. And you can do an admin deal to have somebody collect your money. An administration deal, an admin deal, is where you don't give up any ownership at all. You have someone collect your money for you, and then they take a percentage of the revenue in exchange for the work that they've done. So it might be a 10% deal or a 15% deal. Um, most of my clients use a company called Songtrust. They're online at songtrust.com. This is not an advertisement for Songtrust. They've just done a really good job of collecting money and paying my clients what's due. And the great thing about having an administration company collect your money is they can go overseas and collect your money in Croatia, in Russia, in Asia, in Africa, like wherever your music gets play. And with streaming, It's worldwide today, so you need somebody that knows where to go to collect the money, and then they take a percentage of money as opposed to a percentage of ownership. So they basically eat what they kill. Does that make sense? The way you can really make money with your publishing is you can solicit it to music supervisors to get in film and TV. You can, um, you can solicit it to music supervisors that work for video games. You can, you can utilize your music or even just your beats if you're a producer based on the mood of the song. The fact that you're independent and not signed to a label is a huge plus to music supervisors because it's very easy to get in touch with you. It's very easy for you to sign off on your music. There aren't 30 different people that need to sign an agreement that takes weeks and weeks and weeks because it's going through Warner Brothers, um, uh, business affairs department. So a lot of, um, content providers really like using unsigned and independent artists, which is pretty much you if you're watching this, most of you. So there are lists for sale at rapresources.com of music supervisors, of um, the decision makers at game, um, manufacturers and designers. They're— it's rap-resources.com. It's a site that I set up a couple years ago just so that, um, and we update the list every year. We do it in January of every year, so all the lists are new right now. But it shows you who's who, and then you can either do it yourself if you're great at representing yourself, or have somebody on your team or your manager. But where somebody can actually hawk your music for you, get placements, and then you get paid. You get an advance for that placement against the royalties, and then your publisher collects the publishing money that's due, um, once that advance is paid back. So I'm a big fan of publishing. It's where the money is in the music industry. I'm not a big fan of co-pub deals where you sell a percentage of your music to somebody or your lyrics. I just feel like you're not betting on yourself when you do a deal with somebody else. And of all the deals that I've done in the music industry, I have never done a co-pub deal. I don't like them. I won't do them unless you have a really strong need for the money. And I mean, like, save your life type need for the money. I just don't— I don't see why you'd bet against yourself early on in your career. And then when your music is worth millions of dollars, you're only collecting half the revenue because you did a deal with somebody back when you needed $100,000 that you're probably going to blow in 3 to 6 months anyway. So that may be a little bit negative, but having said that, your publishing is important. Learn as much as you can about it and really protect your publishing. Really think about it. Make sure you have um, an entertainment attorney if you're going to do a pub deal. I know most managers and lawyers like when you do pub deals because they make a percentage of the revenue, and, um, I'm not real happy about that, as you could imagine. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in. See you soon.
