Part 1 of a 5 part blog on publishing; & Independent Artist of the Week.

Hey, it’s TJ Miller, you want some game? Let's Tip Unda The Hat

Last week we talked about copyrights, and I want to stay on the theme of ownership, Let’s go -  

To securely own songs that you have written you will need a copyright. After that you will want to register with one of the Performance Rights Organizations aka PROs. BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. BMI does not charge to affiliate as a songwriter, ASCAP does, and SESAC is just boujee, you have to be invited. They represent songwriters and publishers here in the United States. There are others around the world, but for now we will stay with these. Let’s be clear, music publishing relates to getting paid for the composition of the song, NOT the recording. In our world of DIY, most of you are both the songwriter and the performer, so you are good in that respect. If you are the songwriter, composer, wrote lyrics, the producer, the beatmaker or just shuck your tambourine and own a part of the copyright, then you will earn money from the publishing of that song. For example several songs have more than one or two or even three writers, but they all have ownership in that song. For example Don’t Wake Me Up by Chris Brown has 11 songwriters, and 5 publishers. Everybody gets a piece of the pie.  

Now this week we are primarily focused on Performance Rights, but just so you know there are several different places to make money that we will tackle in the weeks to come; Mechanical royalties, Sync licensing fees, Licenses for samples and Printed sheet music (print rights). 

Performance royalties is the money that radio stations, streaming companies like Spotify and Pandora, restaurants, bars, and live venues pay when they play your music. These entities purchase a blanket license, then report the songs they played back to the PRO. The PRO’s then collect songwriters royalties from the users and pay the songwriters and the publisher. So I know what you are asking; how much? There is no set rate here in the US for performance fees. There are a lot of variables that affect the cost; the type of terrestrial radio station big or small, college (student size), non profit station, internet radio etc, how much the live venue paid for the license, and the list goes on. Look at it like this, the bigger the license fee to the user, the mo money you get. 50% of the performance royalty goes to the songwriter and 50% goes to the publisher. If you are both, then mo money mo money mo money! Hit me with your questions, next week we go to mechanical royalties. 

This week's Independent Artist of the Week is D’ Marie. Click on the name, scroll down the page to hear, buy and support https://www.amazon.com/Be-Continued-D-Marie/dp/B07T3HNJ79 

For more information or to hire Unda The Hat as your brand or label consultant send a message on undathehat.com. See you next week. 

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