Music Publishing & Songwriting

Are you…

a songwriter and producer starting your own record company?
a singer-songwriter signing to an independent label?
a band negotiating its first major label record contract?
or a dj, manager, booking agent or club owner?

Whatever your role in the entertainment industry, you need to understand music publishing. Why? Because that’s where the money is.

In the online course, “Music Publishing 101” at Berkleemusic.com, aspiring songwriters, entrepreneurs, producers, and others can begin to understand the role that music publishing plays in their careers. Over the 12 weeks of the class, you’ll find all you need to know about how to make your music more marketable, license your songs, protect what you write, and collect the income you earn.

For those that don’t know, and that includes plenty of folks who’ve graduated from music school, have their music business degree, or have been in the music industry for decades, the fundamental role of a music publisher is to make music make money. Songwriters write the songs. But music publishers turn those songs into money, by licensing them to those who want to put them on records or ringtones, in a TV show, movie or advertisement, inside a greeting card or a singing stuffed animal.

Anyone can be a music publisher. There are large music publishers, which are divisions of the same corporations that operate the major record labels—like Sony ATV Music, EMI Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing, and Warner Chappell Music. There are medium-sized, independent music publishing companies—like Cherry Lane Music, Kobalt Music, or Bug Music. There are music publishing companies owned by independent record labels, artist management companies, prominent producers, movie studios, and advertising companies.

But most importantly, if you’re a singer-songwriter, a producer, the owner of a record label, or the manager of a band, YOU can be a music publisher. Anyone that works with songs and songwriters should be in the business of music publishing.

In fact, if you’re a songwriter, you already are a music publisher. You became one when you wrote your first song. As soon as a composition has been written, the songwriter is not only the composer, but also the publisher of that song—until he or she decides to assign those rights to someone else. You may already be a publisher. Now you have to learn to be a good one.

Music Publishing 101 was designed to be a step-by-step walk through the process of constructing your own music publishing company. Many students have found that by the end of the course, not only have they learned about this particular segment of the business, but also they already have become operating music publishers. After 12 weeks, their business is up and running, with an effective team to support the day-to-day needs of their company, and a strategy to start making money from their songs.

As the author of

“Making Music Make Money: An Insider’s Guide To Becoming Your Own Music Publisher”, as well as the designer of Music Publishing 101, I’m often asked why someone should take the course, if he or she has already read the book. Of course, the two are closely related, and “Making Music Make Money” is the textbook for the online course. Still, there are plenty of things that set the class apart from the textbook—the most important one being this:

Experience. Would you want to fly in an airplane with a pilot that had merely read a book about flying? Or would you prefer someone with some hands-on experience?

The assignments in “Music Publishing 101” go far beyond textbook examples. In one instance, students actually make a pitch call to their instructor, to get the experience of selling their material. In another assignment, we look at an accounting spreadsheet and learn to understand the income flow and the splits involved in a co-publishing or full-publishing agreement. In another instance, we actually try our hand at picking hits on the Hot 100, trying to estimate where some of the new entries may actually end up. These things are the real day-to-day work of publishing, and the experience of actually doing them can’t be replicated any other way.

The other key element that sets online learning apart from book learning is Interaction. Music Publishing 101 offers students an opportunity to interact with dozens of other musicians and songwriters, many of them already active professionals in the industry. In a classroom setting, you don’t learn only from the teacher—you learn from everyone around you, sharing their experience, insight, and mistakes. Plus, you can ask questions and get advice tailored to your own professional and musical needs in the weekly online chats with the professor.

Best of all, students leave the course with a support network already in place, as they go off to start their own music publishing ventures. Happily, I remain involved with many of the students I’ve had in Music Publishing 101—many of whom are now successfully using their skills in a variety of music industry settings. Their career development and success is a constant inspiration to me, and I always look forward to offering help or advice where I can.

It’s no secret that the current economy could make 2009 a challenging year for many of us. But the best way to face a challenge is head-on—and that means raising your own performance, knowledge and career ambitions. If you’re a songwriter hoping to make 2009 the breakthrough year, you might want to start by joining Berkleemusic’s “Music Publishing 101.” Enrollment is now open for the Winter Term, which starts on January 12th. Tell ‘em Eric sent ya…

Wow– who could imagine a time when the music industry felt more secure than the banking business? And yet, EMI Records winds up outliving Lehman Bros. and Warner Chappell outlasts Merrill Lynch. While no one would declare the record biz to be a healthy, thriving industry, it is now obvious that things could be worse. Thank goodness we didn’t have many financial whiz kids in music– it may be the only thing that saved us.

As the term “investment expert” now enters the realm of oxymorons like “military intelligence” or “government ethics”, it is clear that a lot of those financial whiz kids were not as smart as they appeared. Interestingly, that’s true not only in fields like real estate, mortgage lending, derivatives, etc. Their results in music publishing haven’t been so impressive either…

As I’ve mentioned several times in this blog, music publishing recently became a favorite target of the investment community– as money men looking for new place to park their millions began to gravitate toward what they saw as the goldmine of the music industry. Convinced that they could make a fortune by buying up publishing companies and catalogues, investment companies and hedge funds went on a purchasing spree over the last five years– buying up publishers like Bicycle, Windswept, and Bug, and backing new acquisition-oriented publishing entities like Evergreen, Primary Wave, and many others.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of theories floating around behind this investment-backed shopping expedition. Some made sense– primarily the idea that established music publishing catalogues, unlike record labels, were reasonably predictable income streams that could be counted on as a moderately secure long-term investments. Some of the theories made some sense– that the music industry was undervalued and that surely the industry would someday figure out again how to monetize the value of music, or that growth in China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe would eventually force those countries to tighten up on piracy– although those theories have yet to be proven.

But some of the theories fueling this new investment made no sense at all. Many of these “new” publishers were convinced that better collection and a bigger effort in the Film and TV department would allow them to greatly increase earnings, justifying purchase prices far beyond what any experienced publisher would pay. Catalogues that would have been purchased for 8-10 times their annual earnings a decade ago, were suddenly being snapped up for 14 or 16 times earnings. As most music business veterans shook their hands in wonder, the investment community assured the sellers of the catalogues, who were often songwriters or their heirs, that the new companies were in the game for the “long-run”, not just out to make a quick buck.

It will surprise no one then that most of these companies are now, openly or not so openly, up for sale. The bankruptcy of Lehman has already put one of the companies on the block, and it’s clear that almost all of these new “publishers” are now actively looking for someone to bail them out of the music business. Most likely, the people that will do the bailing are the music business weasels who sold to them in the first place– buying the catalogues back for half of what they sold them for 2 years ago.

What can we learn from this?

In the end, it appears that music-publishing business will soon be handed back to old-fashioned music publishers. For all their faults, that might not be such a bad thing.