Guide to Music Publishing

Video Transcript

"Today, we're going to talk about copyrighting a song and also publishing a song. Now, we're going to talk about music publishing. A lot of people come up to me in the past and they say, "Antonio, Antonio, Antonio. Guess what, man? I've got a publishing company, man, get my songs right." I said, "Man, I got with BMI." Well, guess what? BMI is only one part of publishing and that's called "broadcast music," meaning anything that's in a ringtone, something that's played over the radio, something that's on an online radio station. That's one side of publishing. But publishing, I guess you will say, just to break it down, publishing is really the person who is controlling and collecting money on the song that is commercially being used as a tool. That's all really what publishing is. Publishing is the person who owns the song, controls the song, decide--meaning controlling is to decide where the song goes, if we want it on this movie or if you want it on this television show or if you want this artist to put the song on their record, that's what a publisher does. And they also collect the revenue streams that that song creates; the ringtones, call tones, stuff that goes on albums and that's one side of publishing. The other side of publishing is broadcast companies like ASCAP and BMI and SESAC and they collect monies from the music that we hear out here that are out in the airwaves from the radio and those things. So, most times nowadays, a record label has their own publishing money to collect from records and things going on albums. But a publisher, a broadcast company collects money from the radio station and the things that are not on a disc."