PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Songwriting Publishing Companies and advice

I know many of you have had experience in this area so I wanted to check in for you advice on which Publishing company to select. I know there is CDBaby and Tunecore as the two most branded but there are also others. I did put in an application with BMI as well, compared to ASCAP, and still waiting on their response.

As I get more serious about developing lyrics and music I figured I would start out right. So far the advice on the internet seems to be:
1. Copyright your material (I did that for the song Love You More)
2. Sign up with one of the PROs (BMI, ASCAP)
3. Pick a publishing company (Tunecore, CDBaby, others)
4. Sign up with soundexchange.com

Let me know your thoughts and if I am forgetting anything. I will most likely never be the vocalist if that makes any difference.


Bob

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”

― Hunter S. Thompson

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

Awesome.

Was he on acid and chasing it with embalming fluid when he wrote that???

Any chance??

Bob P., best thing to do is a search in these forums for ASCAP or BMI. There's a lot of posts discussing the very same points you ask about. No need to reinvent the wheel.

1. Nope. I don't copyright my tunes. **
2. Yep. Pick one and sign up as a writer.
3. Are you self publishing? **
4. I recon you can if you want.

** depends on what you want to accomplish. On copyright and publishing (1&3) Lets define this word publishing a bit as it applies to music. It is the act of making your music available commercially, in it's most basic sense. A publishing company is in the business of listening to your music, signing it or accepting it into their catalog if they think it meets their minimum requirements for quality and usability, and connecting with their clients in the business and plugging your music to them for their projects. They also handle the paperwork including registering that song with your PRO, in your account.

You can do it yourself....as in self-publishing, and then you are the one doing the footwork and paying the costs. You have to put the music out there, get it into the hands of the end users and consumers, and foot the marketing costs to do so. You also have to pay the copyright fees on every song you plug in this manner.

The other option, and the one I use, is: I don't copyright anything. I have a number of publishers and music libraries that I work with. I write the music, and send it to them. They put it in their catalogs and handle the publishing end and deal with the copyright. If you sign a song to a publisher under what is called an "exclusive" contract, the publisher is going to copyright the song in their name anyway. You essentially sign it away to them. They take a percentage... normally 50% for providing their services including plugging it to artists and other commercial music users.... (film & TV) I have gotten BMI royalty checks from using this method.

Reason I don't copyright my songs:
No one is out there wanting to steal my songs. As hard as it is to simply get someone to listen to a song, nope.... it's not something that keeps me awake at night. Also... if a publisher likes the song, they will want a contract from you and they will end up registering it in their publishing company's name anyway. If you have registered it already, it's more work for them to transfer that into their account. In film and TV, unless the song is a featured song in a TV show or movie verses just being a fill for a few seconds, none of that music gets copyrighted by anyone other than the copyright on the TV show or film. Listen to a TV show and count the musical fills. Anything from 3 seconds to 20 seconds... there are dozens of them in any given show. They are not copyrighted and the writers don't get their names in the credits. BUT... we do get a quarterly check from BMI ( in my case). No one has ever stolen my 8 second fills. Any time you upload a file to a computer server and even when you create a file, the file gets date stamped. So that is a non-official form of copyright establishing a date of creation.

Of course... this is only my personal point of view. I learned this from songwriters who do this for a living. Other folks have other thoughts and ways of doing things.

Thanks. I guess I used the word publisher wrong here and meant distributor? When referring to cdbaby and Tunecore?

Regarding your #3 - "3. Pick a publishing company (Tunecore, CDBaby, others)"

I would call those "distribution sites". Of the points you listed, it is the one that will matter most to you - because it is where people will find your music and where you will get paid - unless you have your music in a library (which you will need to go down that path yourself to try to get them placed - it is not hard) OR you have your songs published by legitimate Publishers (which is VERY hard and an option that very few people will ever experience).

I recommend CDBaby (others might recommend sites they have used). For a small fee ($49 last I knew), you can upload an album (or CD - whatever you want to call it) and THEY will distribute it to all of the streaming services. They put it on iTunes and Amazon for sale. And THEN they track all of the activity. And pay you if that activity amounts to anything - which it can if you get downloads for an album. The streaming end of things is so very small, it takes HUGE amounts to add up to pennies. (I have pages and pages of streams that do not add up to enough to trigger a payment - but it is cool to see that your songs are being streamed all over the world). Janice & Bud get enough streams and downloads that they get payments now and again...

Create an album and upload it to CDBaby. And then see what happens. It's the best learning experience for that side of things.

You can also try some of the songs sites - like Songtradr - though as far as I know, no one (from here) has made any money there...


Your other 3 points hardly matter in today's music world.
I won't bother with the explanations of why - most people need to find that out for themselves... (you would actually need to a song on the radio or a major release record for that to matter)