Need Refresher How Music Publishing Works?

As you read this, hundreds of investment houses are looking at buying music publishing income streams or song copyrights.

Some of them will be less sure than they would like about exactly what it is they’re buying.

Meanwhile, thousands of music industry students around the globe will be asking themselves: “I don’t get it; how do songwriters actually get paid by [this particular element] of music publishing?”

And, let’s be honest, hundreds of thousands of us currently working in the music business

– whether as songwriters or as executives

– regularly tell ourselves:

“I can’t quite remember how [complicated part of the streaming music publishing royalties landscape] works. I best look it up.”

Now, an expert company in music, Curve Royalty Systems, has launched Royalties 101 – a free, downloadable guide that the firm hopes will become the music industry’s definitive one-stop information resource on publishing royalties.

The aim? To answer any question about music publishing from anyone – regardless of how advanced they might be in their career.

Curve’s Royalties 101 platform offers comprehensive information about every aspect of music publishing, broken down into eleven simple ‘lessons’.

It covers areas including:

• The basics of ‘what is a copyright?’;
• Performance royalties;
• Mechanical royalties;
• Online royalties;
• Sync and other uses;
• and ‘What does a publishing deal look like?’.

To illustrate these lessons, Curve has also provided an (anonymized) example of a royalty calculation, taking into account where a songwriter’s work might be played, and what kind of deal they might be on with their publisher.

Tom Allen, co-founder and CEO of Curve Royalty Systems, said:

“Knowledge of the different rights within music is such an important thing for everyone in this industry to understand, but something that isn’t taught when most of us start our first jobs, and we just piece it together as we go.

“Our aim here was to put together a really comprehensive guide to the rights around publishing, and how they relate to royalty accounting, and to make this freely available so everyone can benefit.”

Tom Allen, Curve Royalty Systems

“Our aim here was to put together a really comprehensive guide to the rights around publishing, and how they relate to royalty accounting, and to make this freely available so everyone can benefit.”

Curve Royalty Systems runs royalty processing software that calculates and processes international royalty calculations for industry partners including Domino, Mad Decent, Gallo, Outdustry, Epitaph, and many others.

The UK-born company has an insider’s view of ‘how royalties work’ on both sides of the Atlantic, having launched in the US in 2021.

Curve recently expanded its presence in North America with the hire of Toronto-based Mhairi Palmer as Director of North American Sales.

Meanwhile, the company has also expanded its UK business this year, adding ex-Kobalt exec Britt Timmerman as Client & Sales Manager.

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