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Over the next week Sound Diplomacy will be taking over the site. They’re a multi-lingual export, research and event production consultancy based in London, Barcelona and Berlin. Find more on them here. Today, they run us through the world of music publishing…

Music publishing consists mainly of the acquisition of the rights from the creator of a music piece with the aim of taking advantage of it. The main roles of a publisher are: registering the music pieces in the rights collection society; managing those rights; collecting, controlling and liquidating the author’s royalties; looking for opportunities to license these pieces; and, in conclusion, promoting the greatest commercial exploitation and public exhibition of the pieces ceded by an artist.

In Spain, we also need to add the right to reproduce and distribute graphic copies of a music piece. When a publisher registers a work with SGAE (the rights collection society for authors and publishers in Spain), a copy of the score also needs to be handed in. This diminishes the competitiveness of Spanish music publishers, since in other countries rights collection societies accept more flexible publishing formats. Unlike the Spanish one, they normally allow online registrations with mp3 files.

Publishing Methods

SGAE Internal Regulations allow mainly four basic publishing methods:

1) Original Publishing: the author cedes the rights to the publisher in exchange of a proportional participation of the exploitation income; the publisher acquires the right to reproduce and distribute the music and carry out public communication, at the same time as is committed to the divulgation and exploitation of the work.

2) Co-publishing: the original publisher cedes the rights to other publishers with the aim to achieve a better exploitation of the music works. For instance: a publisher cedes their rights to a multinational company hoping to improve the commercial exploitation of their catalogue.

3) Sub-publishing: agreement between publishers of different countries, by which a foreign publisher cedes their rights exclusively to a local publisher for a limited territory about one or various specific tracks.

4) General representation contracts: identical to the previous one, but instead of referring to one or various limited tracks, it refers to the cession from a publisher to another of all the works, present and future, of their catalogue.

The Spanish Market

These are hard times for the music market in Spain. The strong financial crisis and the general crisis of the record industry have been incremented by an inopportune increase of the taxes, which has had devastating effects. This is clear from SGAE’s figures. The society collected 268.2 million euros in 2012, which is a decrease of 16.2% with respect to the previous year. Nevertheless, we believe that a reform of the Law of Author’s Rights and the European Board of rights collection societies can contribute to a better clarity and efficiency of SGAE in a near future.

The main sources of income of the publishing business are those originated by broadcasting and cable: public and private radio stations, televisions, pay per view, etc. This income represents almost half of the income of SGAE (129.5 million euros). In this context, although the sync market represents the 10% of the publishing market, this segment has increased in importance over the last years. The sync rights for music pieces are not necessarily managed by any of the Spanish societies (SGAE, AGEDI and AIE). It is therefore an open and growing market.

By the Gracia Music Services legal team