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Navigating the music business can be tricky for creators, especially when dealing with the minute details of rights management and music contracts. Entertainment lawyer/music business professor Karl...

Have you heard the term “sync” or “synchronization” before, but asked yourself “What is music sync”? At a basic level, granting a sync and recording license allows a third party to use the copyright...

Whether you’re a label, manager, publisher, or distributor, industry leaders should always encourage their artists to have honest and open conversations about split sheets. After all, not having them...

Lyric sheets may sound relatively simple — a piece of paper capturing a song’s key verses and choruses — but they’re often a deciding factor in securing major songwriting gigs or sync placements.

When TikTok shared its music report at the tail end of 2021, the company was quick to clarify its position on creators: “Music is at the heart of the TikTok experience. It’s the glue that connects...

Unless they’re part of the public domain, nearly every song in existence follows the same formula when it comes to copyright law. Namely a split between two distinct halves: a one-of-a-kind recording...

Depending on how you define it, the phrase “royalty-free music” is either slightly misleading or woefully inaccurate. For one thing, there’s a big difference between songs that are exploited via a...

According to an encouraging Ampere Analysis report, more than $220 billion was spent on global content in 2021 — a 14% increase (a little over $20 billion) over the previous year. Subscription-based...

When Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) in 1992, “digital recordings” didn’t mean Spotify downloads or bitcrushed MP3s. Back then — a decade before Napster’s shutdown, and Apple’s...

A crucial part of the publishing process is affiliating yourself with pay sources and registering your songs so they can be properly tracked for royalty collection. Not following these steps means...

If you’ve ever wondered “is sync licensing worth it?”, the answer may have been in the RIAA’s annual report for 2022. While streaming revenue saw its first stretch of single digit growth since the...

If there was ever any doubt about the relative sway of syncs in an on-demand world, one needn’t look any further than the fourth season of “Stranger Things”. Aside from the sudden boost Metallica got...

Now that the dust has settled from last year’s NFT rush — a flurry of non-fungible activity that generated millions for such early adopters as Grimes, The Weeknd, and Kings of Leon — you may be...

From sample-heavy hip-hop tracks to synth-laced pop singles, producers have played a pivotal role in shaping recordings since the music industry’s shellac days. They’re even the star of the show...

In a surprise move set to benefit songwriters and publishers throughout the U.S., three major gatekeepers of the music industry — the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), the Nashville...

Songtrust offers YouTube monetization on behalf of our clients’ compositions as part of our worldwide publishing administration services. Here’s how it works: Once you add songs with at least one...

Members of several major trade groups have finally reached an agreement to raise the compulsory rate for physical releases, downloads, ringtones, and music bundles to 12 cents per track. The National...

While they were once considered a sign of “selling out”, sync deals have become a significant source of income among independent musicians in recent years. According to a recent Global Music Report...

According to IFPI’s annual Global Music Report, Latin America saw a 25.9% spike in revenue in 2022, with Mexico — one of its biggest markets — up by nearly the same amount (24.3%). The only region in...

According to IFPI’s annual Global Music Report, Brazil became the world’s ninth biggest market in 2022, landing right in between Canada and Australia. Adding to its position as a global power player...

Radio broadcasting plays a significant role in the British media landscape, led by the publicly-funded and genre-agnostic British Broadcast Corporation (BBC). Unlike in the U.S., terrestrial radio in...

The music industry didn’t just enjoy its seventh straight year of growth in 2021. According to the BBC, international revenue increased at the fastest rate in more than two decades. So fast, in fact,...

Over the last decade, video games have gone from a fun pastime to the main source of entertainment for younger generations. Or as The Guardian put it in a recent opinion piece, “video games have...

A crucial part of music publishing is how pay sources, collection societies, and publishers work together to ensure songwriters receive what they earned. Reciprocal agreements (which we’ll expand...

Note: This article focuses on how composition royalties are split in most countries, but many societies outside of the U.S. break down writer and publisher shares differently. If you’re unsure of how...

Between PROs, IPIs, and ISRCs, you’re probably feeling a little fatigued by all the acronyms in music publishing at this point. The following article should help provide some clarity on the key...

Splitting credits between a song’s co-writers can be tricky. Do you distribute them equally among band members, even if the lead singer wrote its lyrics and the hook everyone’s gonna hum for the...

Are you a full-time artist with a widespread catalog of songs gaining traction online and elsewhere? Or at the very least, on the way to landing your first breakthrough single? If you’re already...

If you’ve found yourself here, we expect that you have some basic knowledge of what synchronization is (and if you don’t we highly suggest heading to this article to learn more). And, hopefully,...

Having a hit single in your home country is one thing — a revenue stream worth seizing if you already have a local PRO or CMO in place to help you collect royalties. But what if a record spreads like...

Whether you write original material alongside other musicians, producers, or a tricky combination of the two, one critical discussion that impacts the careers of most creators is a songwriting split...

Everyone involved in making original music — including band members, producers, songwriters, and composers — has the right to own a portion of their work and collect publishing royalties. To ensure...

As a music creator, especially one that is striving to have a full-time music career, there is so much that you have to do and keep up with to ensure that the music you worked so hard on is now...