Putting Artists First: Music Publishing for Independent Creators

In Part II Marc and Simon get into the nitty gritty of music publishing, A deep dive into streaming %s & synchs, Simon has also authored a few very insight-heavy blogs that everyone should go and read. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is – “Be nice”, and find a great lawyer early. Simon also reveals to Marc one of the “best tips ever”. 

This page is part 2 of the interview with Simon Pursehouse of Sentric Music. Miss part 1? Click here to go back.

Marc: Question: Are streaming or artist royalties the same thing as mechanical royalties?

Simon: Mechanical royalties and sound royalties are different. Mechanical royalties are publishing royalties, sound royalties are master royalties for the record label or the sound recording owner. Master royalties also include neighbouring rights, which is performance but doesn’t include streaming. Neighbouring rights, that is income that’s generated for two people. One is the master rights owner which could be you or the record label. The other half goes to the people who performed on the record but not necessarily the people who own it. So if you’re a session musician, this is where you make your money. Then that part is split further 65/35 in favor of the featured artist. So if you’re Adele, 65% of that 50% is going to you and the other 35% is going to your band. (hope everyone is following along…)

Marc: Why on earth is it called neighbouring rights?

Simon: You’ve caught me – hum (the answer is here) 

Marc: Would the neighbouring rights income be on top of the money you get from Spotify? 

Simon: Yes, it’s completely different. 

Marc: Who pays neighbouring rights then?

Simon: Broadcasters, TV or radio. The networks would pay for the right to do so.

Marc: So when a stream happens on Spotify, 80% goes to the person who owns the recording. Then the other 20% which is the publishing income, is split like you said above. Then neighboring rights are a different stream.

Simon: Exactly. I believe that there are no neighbouring rights for broadcast radio in America, but there is for satellite radio. I’m not 100% on that, as I’m UK-based.

Marc: Tell us about your blog posts.

Simon: For sure. There are two I’d recommend reading. One is called “Just WTF is Music Publishing”. It’s very UK focused but it breaks it all down. Then there’s a Magnus Opus which is titled the “Lifecycle of Music Publishing Copyright”. To help visualize it, I created a fictional band and it follows them through the writing, performing and recording process. It has all of the milestones you’d want to hit as an artist and outlines how much you’re going to get. 

Marc: OK, soon another front… one’s choice of distribution does not impact the kind of royalties your songs will get, right? The choice of who you partner with dictates how much money you’re going to get back. So if you sign to a record label, they’ll give you some money in advance and then they’ll keep the money until you recoup. The system for paying out money is the same but how it’s distributed depends on the deal you have with your partner. Does that make sense?

Simon: Yep! 

Marc: Awesome. Now tell me how is Sentric different from SongTrust. Is it the same type of thing?

Simon: Sort of. SongTrust is more similar to TuneCore, which does a “publishing offering”. What’s different is that our 28-day deal is no-commitment. We also have sync. With SongTrust it’s a minimum of 12 months so you’re tying yourself down for longer. It is also an 85% / 15% split so you get a better deal but it’s a longer commitment. We also do the same deal but we’re a bit more selective with who can have it. Also with SongTrust, you have to pay upfront but with us, you don’t. On the sync side of things, we offer sync non-exclusively, and here is why.

I never want anyone to join Sentric for syncs because syncs are tough. If we pitch a track and get the sync for the artist then we take a cut. If you come to us saying that you have an offer for your music to be used and ask us to handle the paperwork and licensing, then we’ll take a small fee of 15% to make sure you’re being looked after. If you do your paperwork, then we don’t take a penny. 

Exclusivity is pretty standard. If you’re committing to this, you want to feel like you’re being looked after and that the company you’re working with is pushing your work. Never work with a company where you have to pay to submit your work for sync opportunities. My advice is to work smart and not harder when it comes to syncs. I also want to emphasise that you never change your music because you think it might work for syncs, people can usually see straight through that. Music supervisors have two filters – professional and personal filters. We have 11 full-time staff for syncs at Sentric and we have to constantly convince music supervisors that we are worthy of receiving the opportunity to put our catalogue in front of them. You can control the professional filter as an artist by working with the right organizations, but personal filters are different because we all have our tastes and you don’t have any control over that.

Marc: Makes sense. One of the reasons I think things are so exciting for independent artists today is that artists can now choose the kind of deals they want. Do you think this is where artists get confused? How is an artist supposed to figure out what works for them?

Simon: It’s quite genre dependent. If I was just starting, I’d make sure I joined my local PRO and as soon as I started getting streams outside of my territory I’d join a service like Sentric to collect my money from everywhere else. At the end of the deal, the artist would then get their copyright back. There are still some traditional deals out there where artists get a substantial amount of money and in exchange, everything they write for the next 3 years is owned by the company for a retention period, usually around 12 years. That means you’re giving away your copyrights for 15 years, so you need to be careful. If you’re a pop artist specifically, you want to work with a company that has a great creative team so they can get you in the room writing with big names. That part of the industry is even tougher than sync placements, so everyone should also be aware of that. This is often a carrot that is dangled in front of artists to get them to sign but if the A&R person who promised you all of these things leaves in a few months, you suddenly become someone else’s problem who didn’t sign you and does not have the same relationship with you or your music. Here is another piece of advice: if you’re good enough, the industry will come to you. If you’re putting out music and content and you are not getting people sliding into your DMs or coming to your shows, there’s a very good chance that you aren’t good enough yet. That’s not meant to be discouraging,  as I am sure you can get there. Once you are putting out great music and blowing minds live you’ll have people lining up to meet with you. One of those people will be a lawyer, who remains an essential member of your team, making sure all deals are what they should be.

Marc: I think that’s great advice. Here’s a question – if I’m one of those local artists and I make a couple of records but I haven’t collected my money from my PRO yet. Once I decide to collect it, how far back can you collect the money? 

Simon: Different PROs have different rules for how far back you can go. And to make it even more complicated, those rules differ for the different types of income sources. Be very wary of any publisher who tries to tell you that if you come on board with them, there’s a certain amount of money they can collect. We can make an estimation, but you can never really know what the actual number is, so they are not being honest with you. I’m a huge believer in under-pricing and over-delivering. I’d say the general rule when it comes to going back to collect is about 12 months, sometimes up to 24. The worst thing about music publishing is the lag between activity and payment. If everything is properly registered and in place, you as a songwriter will get that money in about 9 months. To get the money for the territories where you haven’t collected it yet, we have this thing called back claims for streaming which can take 18 months to come through.

Marc: So the advice is you have to join one PRO in your home territory immediately. 

Simon: Exactly. And then as soon as you start getting 100,000+ streams, join a publishing administrative service. 

Marc: We have a question from Ria who is part of our audience today (don’t forget that on the last Tuesday of each month a new #HowWeListen Live: In Conversation takes place with a different guest and anyone can take part live and online) 

Ria: Thank you! This is so informative for independent artists. I recently won a competition and they put me in touch with one of the UK’s leading A&Rs. He was then kind enough to put me forth to one of the best lawyers in the industry and I had a meeting with him recently. I wondered from your experience if you have any advice on what an artist should be asking or trying to understand from a lawyer.

Simon: At the moment, just be nice to absolutely everyone. Don’t worry about committing to anyone too soon. If the lawyer is a good one and you get on, fair enough but don’t worry too much about that as there will be many others. Most careers are built on whether the person is nice and easy to work with since there are so many talented musicians out there.

Marc: Excellent advice. Just to add to that, you also need to build a team that you feel represents your music the way you want to be represented. It’s okay to pass up on opportunities if you don’t feel like they’re aligned with how you see your career progressing.  

Ria: I have another follow-up question. With Sentric and syncs specifically, how much does the music play a part in who you want to work with and how much does the quantity of an artist’s streams play a part?

Simon: Well in terms of the weekly brief we send to music supervisors, we just include things we feel fit the brief. What makes something right is usually the budget. If someone comes to us saying they’re looking for a hip-hop track but they only have $10k, we’re not going to put forth Drake. We’ll put forth the emerging artists who fit the vibe and are in the price range. As for support, you need to give the sync team everything they might be able to use to increase your chances of having your track picked. Include information about awards you’ve won, playlists you’ve been on, all of it. Tastemakers respect tastemakers’ taste if that makes sense. Give your sync team lots of ammo when pitching your music. 

Ria: Thank you so much.

Marc: So Simon, now that there is so much data, Sentric 17 years ago wouldn’t have had as much business intelligence in terms of knowing how much an artist of a certain size should generate. Now that you’ve been doing it for so long, is it easier to locate the income since you have a much better idea of what somebody should be making?

Simon: Exactly. We have a data and insights team here at Sentric and we look at all of the information and distributions we get from all of the world. If songwriter A is earning X amount and songwriter B is earning more but they have a similar amount of streams and they’re based in the same territory then something has gone wrong. So maybe they haven’t joined a PRO properly or it’s not being properly logged. We’ll investigate that internally to make sure we find out what’s going on. We also have a tracking team. For example, one of our writers wrote all of the lyrics for one of the Just Eat campaigns that Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg etc. were in. That ad was on all the time, so we had to make sure that every time it was broadcast they were paid.

Marc: It seems to me that the biggest argument for joining a company like yours is exactly that since you have so much more access to information and better troubleshooting.

Simon: Exactly. Because we’re one of the biggest companies in our space in the world, each of the PROs has a specific rep from our company ”bugging them” so they’re more likely to help remedy the problem more quickly since we are a huge client for them. Even with that though, everything in publishing does take a very long time.

Marc: OK, back to syncs – I found that a lot of people think that their music is “sync-able”. What’s your advice to artists wanting to make music for syncs? What do you do if you’re just getting going and you’re very interested in getting syncs?

Simon: I’d say make music for music’s sake. If you want to get into music specifically for sync, then you should go down the production route. There’s a whole industry out there that deals with music made specifically for syncs. We are more focused on the commercial sync route. That’s music that’s released and then subsequently gets used for syncs. Ultimately, if we look at the songs that we’ve synced the most over the years, it’s all about the hooks. It’s music that you hear once or twice and it gets straight to the point and gets stuck in your head. We’ve had artists get $100k sync deals for songs that had less than 10,000 streams on Spotify. There is no right or wrong way to do it but you should look at where music similar to yours is getting played, go there and focus. I will add, that no one has ever gotten a sync deal by sending out a mass generic email. If you email me and take the time and effort to research me and send me a personal email, I’m way more likely to respond than if I’m included as a BCC. Also, be prepared to be ignored as it happens time and time again. Here is another tip, I’d recommend that when you follow up, don’t send a fresh email, reply to the email you’ve already sent so they know you followed up. 

Marc: Oh Yeah. Simon, that is hands down the best piece of advice I have heard in a long time, and so simple. Learning to write personal emails to people is such an important skill, you are so right. 

OK, we have a question from Estonia: does an EU artist lose some income stream if they worked with a UK or a US publisher?

Simon: It all depends on where the company is held and what that company’s tax treaty is with the country you’re from. 

Marc: OK, how about this: Should an emerging artist wait until they have a certain number of streams before working with Sentric? You said that they should get going themselves and wait until they hit 100,000, is that right?

Simon: You just have to realize that there won’t be too much money to collect until your music garners a lot of streams, or from broadcasts etc. In my opinion, as soon as you write your first song you should open up a Sentric account and get it registered so it’s ready in case the song does pop off. In terms of sync, make sure the music is finished before you send it over – never send a demo. You only get one first impression so it should be your finished, polished work.

Marc: The good thing about joining early is that you also begin to learn what sort of information people need. Is there any type of database for historical sync placements and fees usually paid?

Simon: No, this is where expertise comes into play. We’ve had artists that were offered a certain amount for a sync. They then come to us and we look at the deal and can better negotiate higher rates since we tend to know what the value should be due to experience. I will say though, we have also seen terrible deals that the artist ends up taking because even though they’re getting paid much less than they should, getting something is better than nothing. There is always the risk that whoever made the offer might just go and have a new songwriter go and write a song for their advert, show or whatnot. So sometimes even with poor money,  it can be worth it for an artist to take the deal in terms of exposure and income. There is no master database but always make sure you work with someone who knows the music industry and what it’s worth. 

Marc: Back to lawyers, Simon how might a new artist find the best entertainment lawyers and sync agents in the UK for example? Is that impossible to answer?

Simon: Ahhh, yes a tough one for sure. One can always look at the Music Week Awards, (or the equivalent wherever you might live) and see who has been/was nominated that year and get in contact with them from there. 

Marc: That’s a great tip. Quickly back to syncs – how do you know what to charge?

Simon: The things that make sync valuable are: territory – so the more territories it’ll be played in the more money it costs. Also the length of the license. The longer the license, the more you charge. The media it will be in is also very important. The bigger the media, the more you charge. Ultimately, the thing that dictates the sync is the profile of the artist. So even though we have gotten 6 figure sync deals from completely unknown artists, Coldplay will always get more because they can charge for it.
Marc: Simon you have been a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much for spending time with us and giving all of us a better sense of how publishing works. Especially the neighbouring rights insights. I will warn you now, that we will be having you back for a part two follow-up.