What Is the Importance of Publishing Relationships?
Music publishing is often the very first partner a musician has, but how do you forge these relationships and make money? Let’s think about how the music industry works. It operates as two strands monetising several copyright controls. Labels exploit the master rights of a track whereas publishers exploit the literary and music works, in other words benefiting songwriters. For example, when music is licensed for a streaming service, a direct deal between the service and a record company will give them a license for the sound recording, whilst a separate deal will be made with a publisher or a collecting society such as PRS, will license the song. Because streaming is a form of on demand content, they require a mechanical license to ensure the music can be reproduced, communicated and made readily available. With all of these different licenses comes different deals, which differ around the world. So how do we manage them?
Long-term administration deals are also fast replacing publishing deals to improve transparency around data, and are more appealing to artists as they do not require a complete assignment of songwriting copyright. They can still benefit from regional expertise in international markets, and become less reliant on collecting societies that have varying degrees of efficiency when it comes to royalty collection. Managing Director of Cooking Vinyl Publishing Ryan Farley, discusses how he re-shaped the department to forge different varieties of sub-publishing deals around the world in favour of his artist roster, that currently compromises of Alex Patterson from The Orb, Marie Dahlstrom and Avelino. He shares the motivations behind the decisions he took and the outcomes of the partnerships he forged. He explains the relationship he has with artists, and how to provide the support they need whilst managing such a small department that is internationally renowned.
Pevious to this Ryan was former A&R manager at Warner Chappell, championing artists such as Madeon who produced for Lady Gaga and Ellie Goulding and Max McElligott who wrote for Wolfgang. We tail end the conversation speaking about the change in A&R, democratisation of playlisting and the role of DSP’s in an ever growing digital world as a result of the pandemic. As well as the battle labels have to conform to changes that new start-ups are advocating - to make the industry more sustainable and create more value for artists, not always pressurising them to meet commercial goals.