Although I have some blog posts to catch up on, I decided to start with the one for last week regarding publishing and synchronisation since, after long consideration, music supervision synchronisation is the topic I wish to write my assignment 1 about.

Both of last week’s readings attempted to do the same, namely explain the processes, the history and the changes in publishing and synchronisation, but in different ways.

In chapter 4 of Ann Harrison's book “Music: The Business” from 2005 she discusses, from the point of view of songwriters, how to find a music publisher, what it really is a music publisher does and what rights a songwriter has.

This has become an increasingly important topic since the many ways of synchronisation tend to make deals more complicated than they ever were before.

Among other things and other numbers, she discusses that music publishers usually demand a greater share of the mechanical royalties where a synchronisation license is acquired, this goes up to around 30-35%, around 10% higher than usual. Harrison argues that there is no real reason for the publishers to do that, but maybe it comes back to the simple fact that synchronisation has become such a big - if not the biggest part - of the gross income acquired through any type of publishing. And undeniably, music publishers wish to make money out of this, or rather they know they can.

Harrison explains many approaches a songwriter can try to make more money and protect their rights, including being a self-published writer or trying different sorts of deals, depending on the popularity of a songwriter and the range of the available catalogue: An administration deal in which the music publisher’s only job is to “administrate” rather than look for any opportunities for the songwriter’s catalogue, a sub-publishing deal which is a mixture of an administration deal and the third kind of deals: the exclusive publishing agreement which, in short, hands over all or most of the rights, but also all the duties to the publisher.

She also names examples of artists that became famous because of a music licensing deal, like e.g. Wet Wet Wet’s song “Love is all around” which was featured in “Four Weddings and a Funeral”.

The wonderful trailer can be seen here for your viewing pleasure:

Passman, as we established today in class, wants to explain the way things are, which isn’t that simple because things in the music industries only are until they change again.

He gives a brief insight into the development of music publishers starting with Tin Pan Alley all the way through to today’s publishing and licensing environment.

Something that definitely struck a chord during the Passman reading was the term of the “creative publisher” who, rather than just getting your music out there and collecting the money for it,  puts writers together with other writers or even gives input and suggestions on the writing himself. Other than Harrison’s explanations that music publishers tend to integrate more and more parts that usually belong to record companies, e.g. creating opportunities for recording studio time, the “creative publisher”, I believe, might be a “product of the synchronisation” of sorts, since the synchronisation process can be improved even further by such a strong cooperation between the songwriters and the publishers. This is definitely something I will think about a bit more.

Gabi