The Business of Music Publishing

Music publishing is the industry responsible for connecting songwriters with appropriate recording artists, promoting songs, handling copyright registration, and supervising the very profitable process of royalty collection and payment. Long overshadowed by the more glamorous recording industry, music publishers are at the pivotal center of the music industry and the incubators of every hit record. This book provides a necessary comprehensive overview of the music publishing business, with advice on how to break in. It demonstrates how publishers must reconcile creativity with commercial considerations, impose management disciplines on the creative process, apply business techniques to acquiring and marketing music, and maximize productivity in order to generate the profits necessary for creative forces to flourish. Detailed chapters illustrate the principles of copyright management, licensing, contract analysis, asset and talent acquisition, and effective marketing techniques to produce revenues from both traditional sources as and new income streams.