ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the types of income that are generated in the music publishing industry and the kinds of deals commonly struck between publishers and songwriters. It focuses entirely on the composer, the music publisher, and the musical composition. There are eight major categories of music publishing income: mechanical royalties, performance rights, samples and interpolations, synchronization, print rights, lyric reprints, new media, and grand rights. Record companies pay songwriters mechanical royalties based on the number of units sold to the public that contain songs written by those songwriters. One discount to mechanical royalties, unique to North American record companies, applies when songwriters who are also recording artists or record producers grant a 25% discount from the statutory mechanical rate to their record companies when the record company releases records containing songs written by the songwriter/artist. Samples occur when other artists incorporate some or all of a songwriter's song into their new work by using a digital recorder/sampler.
