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Major publishing companies have a horde of lawyers who spend their lives drafting and negotiating Co-Publishing Agreements between their client and various other publishing companies that have interests in certain songs. Most commonly this occurs when a writer under contract to one publishing company co-writes a song with another writer under contract to another publishing company. Publishing companies would all prefer to own all of the publishing rights to a song, but they know that's not always possible. Co-Publishing Agreements are simply agreements pursuant to which two or more publishing companies agree to share the publishing rights, administrative obligations, and income related to a particular song.
But what happens if you are an independent songwriter, with your own publishing company, and you co-write a song with someone else who either has his or her own publishing company or is under contract with another publishing company? Most songwriter contracts (which set forth the fact that you are under contract with your publishing company) cover this scenario by providing that your interest in the song (usually one-half) is owned by them. In the example above, the other writer's interest would be owned by his or her publishing company. This works fine as far as splitting up the interests goes. But what about administration of the song. Who files the copyright papers? And in whose name? Who has the right to grant mechanical licenses? Etc., etc. As you can see, there is often a need for some clarification of the parties' rights, duties and obligations. If you are with a major publishing company, it will handle all of this for you (whether you like it or not). But if you're independent, with your own publishing company or with a small or inexperienced publishing company, you will need to deal with all of this yourself. Here's how I do it. I have my own publishing company, Err Bear Music (BMI). EBM doesn't accept outside material. Its sole purpose is to administer my songs. I was a staff writer for a small publishing company for a while, but I didn't like it very much. Many writers will be "asked," often by the producer, to give up some or all of the publishing rights to their song in return for a cut. That's hard to do if you don't own them. So I decided to keep my publishing rights and go it alone. In fact I often tell my musician clients (remember that I am a lawyer by day) that the only thing harder to do than getting a publishing deal is getting out of it. And this is an important thing to remember. These days anyone with an AOL account can slap up a web page
The copyright of the article The Art of the Deal- Independent Co-Publishing Agreements in Songwriting Industry is owned by Kent Newsome. Permission to republish The Art of the Deal- Independent Co-Publishing Agreements in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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