Not that you care, but it's not about sheet music so much anymore, nor is it about
advances on future royalty income. It's
not even that much about finding commercial placements in movies or recording
artists for the songwriter's works.
Licensing and royalty collection are administrative tasks artists can do
themselves, or they can hire agencies to do it on their behalf so they can
avoid the annoyance and focus on writing & recording.
What these people need more than anything else to do this
grunt work for you and take their cut is data and metadata, and the way you
provide it is spreadsheets. There are so
many different types of rights and royalties out there to be had, there are
specialists and no one-stop-shop for all of your song and music publishing
needs. So, whether you attempt DIY
publishing or agree to give a cut to someone else to do it for you, they're
going to need you to get the data to them, and like it or not, there's only one
good way to do so.
Just as Soylent Green IS people, what "the expert
advice-givers" never tell you about music publishing is that it is nothing
but spreadsheets and copy/pasting. Get
used to your keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+P to paste) because
they're going to come in handy if you have your own music publishing
company.
In this day and age anyway, that's pretty much all music
publishing amounts to - in order to have a chance to get any royalty money at all
from songs you've written, you submit spreadsheets to organizations who find
you that money, most of whom take a cut first, then they give you the
rest. They can't do any of it for you,
nor can you do any of it for yourself for that matter, if you don't first have
a bunch of data in spreadsheets.
In the digital era, although vinyl records are experiencing a
temporary resurgence in popularity, brick and mortar record stores are
not. When you write your own songs,
record your own versions of your own songs, and sell those recordings online,
you have certain licensing rights. So,
with that in mind, perhaps it shouldn't be too shocking that digital metadata
about your songs and recordings needs to be uploaded to databases, and one
known, somewhat easy way to do that is via spreadsheets. Yes, it's true, spreadsheets are therefore the
basis of making sure you get paid for all the various licensing rights you
have.
These organizations and agencies who collect your various
royalties for you each need slightly different data, so they each have their
own spreadsheets, their own templates, their own formatting, their own requirements
for submission, etc. So, get ready to
copy certain things like your song titles from one into another. Some care about ISRC #s, some care about ISWC
#s, some care about UPC #s, etc., and some care about the same ones as each
other too, but no two ever care about the same exact numbers as each other.
It's a royal pain when you have a 100+ song catalog like
me. Ultimately, these collectors take a
cut to do the even more painful tasks of
bugging the online music retail stores, download stores, streaming services,
etc. to check their records for your songs and get them to pay fairly. Unless you have tons of free time and you are
a lawyer in addition to being a songwriter/recording artist/publisher, you're
generally glad to give them their fee upon collection.
Can't do it without populating and submitting those
spreadsheets though, which I suppose you could pay someone to do for you, but
this is the part that you must get right from the get-go, so it's better to
trust yourself, particularly if you're like me and represent yourself
alone. Some have a web user interface
with fields to populate, some even taking advantage of auto-complete, so that
helps. Even so, when you upload one at a
time in that manner, they often then allow you to download what you entered as
- you guessed it - a spreadsheet.
Who are these organizations who need the spreadsheets, you
might be wondering? All of them,
basically. Even those whom you'd expect
would have awesome software to handle this kind of stuff, like Google and their
YouTube Content ID RightsFlow Partner program, still have a bunch of dreaded spreadsheet
templates! Other "tracking
companies" for lack of a better thing to call them might include some
names like Harry Fox, SESAC, Kobalt, AdRev, Re:Sound, SongTrust, Songfile,
TuneCore, TuneSat, Rumblefish, etc.
Quite often music-related companies that provide other music-related
services such as distribution or cover song clearance also offer publishing
administration services like the ones I'm referring to here.
Whether they call it import/export/ingest or some other term,
it's all about unique identifiers and codes.
People have to act as liaisons to the number-crunching machines, and one
of them in the process is you doing your copy/pasting and attaching those .xls
or .csv files to an email. Other people
then have some grunt work ahead of them - which may be as easy as connecting to
YouTube's database, performing searches, finding matches, comparing ID#s, doing
some accounting, etc. - in other words, all digital computer-based work; whereas it may be as hard as making actual
phone calls to real people, sending emails, or even getting lawyers involved. Machine automation and artificial
intelligence can't read your mind for much of it yet, so human beings are still
required. Now you know what most
probably don't about music publishing - in a nutshell, it is mostly
spreadsheets.
