As you read this, hundreds of investment companies are considering buying music publishing revenue streams or song copyrights. Some of them will be less sure than they would like of exactly what they are buying.
Meanwhile, thousands of music industry students around the world will be wondering, “I don’t get it; how are songwriters actually paid by [this particular element] music publishing?
And, let’s be honest, hundreds of thousands of us who currently work in the music industry – whether as songwriters or as executives – regularly say to ourselves, “I can’t quite remember how [complicated part of the streaming music publishing royalties landscape] works. I better look.
Today, music expert company Curve Royalty Systems has launched Royalties 101 – a free downloadable guide it hopes will become the music industry’s one-stop resource for information on music publishing royalties. .
The goal? Answer any question about music publishing somebody – regardless of their level of advancement in their career.
Curve’s Royalties 101 platform is a free online guide to all aspects of music publishing, broken down into eleven simple “lessons”.
It covers areas such as:
The basics of ‘what is copyright?’ ;
Representation fees;
Mechanical royalties;
Online royalties;
Synchronization and Other Uses;
and ‘What does a publishing contract look like?’.
To illustrate these lessons, Curve has also provided an (anonymized) example of calculating royalties, taking into account where a songwriter’s work might be performed and what kind of deal they might have with its editor.
You can view (and bookmark) Curve 101 Music Publishing Royalties via this link.
Tom Allen, co-founder and CEO of Curve Royalties Systems, said: “Knowing the different rights within music is such an important thing for everyone in this industry to understand, but something that is not taught when most of us start our first jobs, and we put them together as we go.
“Our goal here was to create a really comprehensive guide to publishing rights and how they relate to royalty accounting, and to make it freely available for everyone to benefit from.”
Tom Allen, Curve Royalty Systems
“Our goal here was to create a really comprehensive guide to publishing rights and how they relate to royalty accounting, and to make it freely available for everyone to benefit from.”
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 more.
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 hiring of Toronto-based Mhairi Palmer as Director of North American Sales.
Meanwhile, the company also expanded its UK operations this year, adding former Kobalt executive Britt Timmerman as director of sales and customers.The music industry around the world
