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Anyone got your own music publishing company?


MacDaddy
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Think of a company name. Set it up as a limited company. Job done.

However if you actually want to make some money out of your company you need to either:

1. Get together a catalogue of music that TV, film and game producers will want to use in their productions, or that other well-known artists will want to cover. Employ someone with plenty of music/TV/film/gaming industry contacts who will spend all day on the phone/email/social media persuading producers to use music from said catalogue.

2. Alternatively you could sign up lots of gullible artists to your publishing company then sit back and take 25-50% of their performance royalties for doing f*ck all.

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You can set up a publishing company in the way that BRX said. However....

If you want PRS/MCPS to collect  any royalties for publishing, you will need to join them first.

 

Check out the 'Music Publishers Association' for some good advice.

https://mpaonline.org.uk/mpafaqs/how-do-i-form-a-music-publishing-company/

 

Joining MCPS as a publisher.

https://www.prsformusic.com/join/publisher/what-you-need-to-join-mcps

 

Joining PRS as a publisher.

https://www.prsformusic.com/join/publisher/what-you-need-to-join-prs

 

 

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Apologies if my original post came over being somewhat flippant.

I think it would help to give you the correct advice if we knew why you wanted to set up a publishing company?

If it is simply for the purpose of collecting "publishing" royalties on your own songs, you don't need one. Just join the PRS and MCPS as a writer member and when you register the songs make the royalty splits add up to 100% between all the writers. If there is no publisher assigned to a song the writer members will get all the royalties. IIRC correctly it actually costs more to be a publisher member of the PRS and MCPS than it does to be a writer member, so there is no financial advantage.

Signing to a good, well-established publishing company can have advantages if you want to get others to cover your songs or have a better chance of them being picked up for use in TV/film/game soundtracks, or if you think it can be used as a stepping stone to getting a record contract (does that even happen nowadays?) However the publishers need to have all the contacts to be able to get your songs listen to by the right people, and I would expect a sizeable amount of cash as an advance on signing.

The Terrortones had a number of small publishing companies interested in us from the release of our first single onwards, but when we questioned them closely on exactly what they were going to do with the songs to justify them taking between 20% and 50% of the royalties, they quickly stopped talking to us.

The only time I can think that having your own publishing company could be an advantage would be if you are going to use a US based PRO to collect your US royalties as I believe they will keep back 50% of all performance royalties on works that do not have a publisher assigned to them. This shouldn't be an issue if you are using a non-US PRO such as the PRS to collect your US  royalties.

I hope that is more useful.

 

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