Publishing For Producers :: Producer's 20/20 Vision

Hey y'all, so Producer 2020 Vision publishing. Publishing is the ownership of the actual music, and we talked about split sheets yesterday, which gave you the opportunity to claim your ownership in writing. Publishing is the actual ownership that you have in your music the second you make a beat. And that is where the money is in music. When you own your own publishing, it's sort of like real estate, right? It's like owning— it's like owning land or owning a house where you can choose to sell the house to make money, or you can sell a piece of your land to make money, or you can rent out your house and make money. There's just different ways that when you have ownership, you can make money from that ownership. And as I mentioned yesterday, the best article that I've read, or the best book that I've read on publishing, is in Donald Passman's book Everything You Need to Know About the Music Industry. And he breaks down publishing beautifully. I also mentioned an ebook you can get from Songtrust, songtrust.com, and it's a free ebook that explains what publishing is. A lot of my clients do use Songtrust to collect their money, especially their overseas money, but somebody has to collect your publishing for you. I mean, you could do it yourself technically if you had that skill set, but most producers don't have a skill set to collect money, to collect their publishing. So a good idea would be to do an administration deal with somebody so that they could go and collect your money for you, and then they take a percentage of the money that they go get. You can also do a publishing deal, and a publishing deal is where you sell— sell, not give away, but sell— part of your publishing to somebody for an upfront advance. I personally am not a big fan of publishing deals because I feel like as a producer you're betting against yourself. For example, if you're a brand new producer, of course you need money. All new producers need money, and you could go and do a publishing deal once you've got a little bit of notoriety under your belt, but the advance you're going to get is going to be very small because you haven't proven yourself yet. You haven't reduced the risk in the publisher's eyes to advance you the money. So they may give you a $100,000 advance, a $50,000 advance, a $200,000 advance, but in return they're going to own half of your publishing for the amount of time of that deal. So let's say it's a 3-year deal or a 5-year deal or a 7-year deal. They're going to own 50% of your publishing. They are betting that your publishing is going to be worth more than whatever that advance is in that period of time. So let's say, for example, you do a deal with Sony ATV Publishing, and let's say they give you a $100,000 advance. And I'm just picking that number out of the sky because it's a round number and I'm a little tired. So they advance you $100,000 for 50% of your publishing. That means going forward for all of the music that you make in the next 5 years that you're signed to them, that they're going to— they're betting that they're going to make more than $100,000. So they're advancing you $100,000 with the intention of making back $150,000 or $200,000 or $1 million or $5 million. Their goal is to make more money than what they're advancing you. And that money is an advance. It's not cash off the top. It's not really cash up front. It's an advance. So they're advancing you your own money. My complaint about publishing deals is that you're probably going to use that money to live. It's probably going to be gone relatively quickly, but you're going to be beholden to that publishing company for the next— whatever's left in your term— the next 5 years or 3 years or 7 years. It just seems— it seems like as a producer doing a pub deal that you're betting against yourself. I'd much rather see you do an administration deal. You might not get a chunk of money up front, but you're betting on the fact that you're going to have 100% ownership of your publishing. And if you ever got into dire straits, you could cash advance that publishing or you could go do a pub deal then at that point in time once your publishing is worth more. I still don't love publishing deals for, for, for folks that are making millions of dollars off of their publishing because again, I just feel like you're betting against yourself. But I do understand it, um, when you're at a point where you're making multi-millions of dollars from your publishing. If somebody's going to give you, you know, 7 times the value or 10 times the value or 5 times the value, it may makes sense to you to do that deal at that point in time. But until your publishing gets into that stratosphere where it becomes you betting with yourself instead of against yourself, it just doesn't really make sense to me. So that's basically publishing. A co-publishing deal is where you give up a percentage of ownership to somebody. An administration deal is where you keep 100% of the ownership, but you pay somebody to go collect your money for you. And that admin admin fee might be 10%, it might be 15%, but they go and get your money, they keep a percentage of what they have collected for you, and then they pay the rest to you. And of course, as a new producer, you want to make sure that you've signed up for either BMI or ASCAP or SESAC, um, and do some research. I think there's another one out there besides those three. I think there's four of them, and there may be five of them now. But do the research, figure out which one is best for you as a producer. Also sign up for SoundExchange. SoundExchange is how you get paid when music streams on the internet, and your ASCAP and BMI money is when your song gets played at radio or when it's played live. You get a percentage. Remember that you own 50% of a song, which is 100% of your ownership, right? So if you do a publishing deal and you've got to deliver 6 songs but you only own 50% of each song, that's really 12 songs. It's not 6 songs. And your publishing rep is probably not going to explain it to you that that's the case. So many times I've seen people sell what they think is 6 songs. Oh, just make 6 beats and sell them and I'll be out of my pub deal. No, it's, it's 12 because it's, it's 6 100% ownership shares. So if you're only owning half, or let's say you sample somebody and they charge you 25% for that sample, then you've got to deliver even more because you're only owning 25%. If you're doing a 6, um, a 6-song deal, that's 600%. And however you have to piece that together in order for them to they're 600% is how you're going to do it. The last point I'm going to make about pub deals is, um, another thing that, that contributes to me not liking them. When somebody is courting you to do a publishing deal, they're going to come to you and say, hey, we're going to do this publishing deal with you and we're going to go find you more work and we're going to get you placements with famous artists. So you're sitting back saying, wow, so I'm gonna do this deal and they're gonna go get me on the next Khaled album, or they're gonna get me on the next Black album, or the next Future album, or the next Drake album. But that's not really what they do. In the 28 years that I've been doing this, I can count on one hand the number of publishing companies that I've seen go and get work and bring it back to one of their rap producers that I know. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'm just saying that it doesn't happen a lot because, again, I can count on one hand the number of producers I know where they can say to me, oh, Warner Chappell brought me this, this opportunity, or Sony ATV brought me this opportunity, or Universal Publishing brought me this opportunity, or Famous Music brought me this opportunity. In order to have a publisher go and get you opportunities, you've got to be a priority within that company. You've got have great relationships with the folks that work there, and they've actually got to do the work. And that's one of the selling points that they're going to tell you they're going to go do, but my concern is that they're not. So just be very careful and know that whatever somebody tells you in the sales process of getting you to do a deal with them, if it's not in writing, they never said it. If it's not listed in the deal that they're going to go get you X amount of placements and a certain amount are going to have to be with a top, um, a top-line artist, they don't have to do that. Okay guys, I hope this was helpful. Go and do more research. One of the things about publishing is that you can study it for years and still learn new stuff about it. I am learning new stuff about publishing every day because there's so many different kinds of publishing. There's sales royalties, there's mechanical royalties, there's sync— synchronization royalties. I call them sync fees, um, sync— synchronization royalties. There's just so many different ways that you can get paid from the ownership of your publishing. Keep your publishing, keep ownership. If somebody wants to do a deal, ask them if it's a co-publishing deal where they're going to split ownership with you, or if it's an administration deal. Keep as much ownership as you possibly can. I know when money's tight, it's It's hard to keep ownership, but I'll tell you this, I've never heard an artist complain to me that they kept the ownership of their publishing, but hundreds and hundreds of artists have complained to me that they've given up a percentage. Okay guys, take care.