Most songwriters know that having great songs and a great sound is only the first step to making music a full-time career. The next step is to assemble a team of professionals to distribute your music and make sure you collect all your royalties. Even songwriters with a distribution deal in place should understand what a publisher does and how they can help you succeed. Working with both is the best way to make sure you effectively manage the business side of your career and collect all the money you earn. Below are the major differences between what a publisher will do for you and what a distributor will do - make sure to know the difference.

Spotify has become a wildly popular music streaming service – but for indie songwriters and musicians, figuring out how that popularity can profit them may not be so obvious. The good news is that streaming can mean real money – if you learn how to get the most out of it and treat it like a business. Here are some ways to make your Spotify account work for you as well as how to make sure you get the money owed to you once it does.

Songtrust is proud to attend and network with music business professionals and songwriters at events around the globe. This month our team headed to Atlanta for A3C Conference & Festival, an annual conference and festival that has become one of the most important hip-hop events of the year, commonly referred to as “Hip-Hop’s Family Reunion".

Our mission was, not only to announce the launch of our new Atlanta office, but to bring exposure of the Songtrust brand, spread the word about music publishing to producers and beat-makers, and network with music industry professionals via our expo booth, workshops and discussing the state of data on a panel with fellow peers.

The act of creating music is a reward unto itself – but even the most evolved songwriters need to eat. While it can be a thrill to hear your music on Spotify or YouTube, it can be even more exciting to be compensated for your work every time someone listens to it. But reaping those rewards can seem like a daunting task to a songwriter – especially one who doesn't know the complex path to compensation. Here are the reasons every songwriter should have publishing.

AROWAGENCY IS AN Australian-based music company specializing in artist management, digital and social media marketing, publicity and event management.

With combined experience across marketing, digital and social media, publicity, radio, A&R, artist development, label management and publishing, co-founders Elizabeth Browne and Tamara Georgopoulos work to create engaging campaigns to connect artists and organizations with their audiences.

They bring creativity, passion and a dedicated focus to everything we do. They stand for diversity and aim to create a supportive and inclusive community within the music industry.  

Ah, synthpop. Now there’s a word that rolls off the tongue like “soft-serve,” or any other sweet confection of days gone by. A guilty pleasure, a bit of cotton-candy for the ears, and a musical genre many thought—or sometimes hoped—was relegated to the dustbin of history.

Though they may not grab the same headlines that SCOTUS, the 2018 midterms and #MeToo so rightly do, there have been massive and historic changes in the music business this year. Three separate but related pieces of legislation—the Music Modernization Act here in the United States plus significant copyright reforms both in the US and the EU—are poised to alter the financial landscape for the better for artists, songwriters and publishers. After many long, lean and frustrating years for many in the music business, a sensible and up-to-date framework for managing the complicated business of music rights is finally coming into view.

FOUNDED IN 2004, HeadCount is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to voter registration and voter engagement. Working with a small core staff and a national network of volunteers, they hold voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives at music festivals, concerts, and cultural events nationwide.

Their work focuses on advancing participation in the democratic process by going directly to new and young voters to educate them on upcoming deadlines and elections, as well as registering them if they are not currently on the voter rolls in their states. HeadCount has registered more than 500,000 individuals to vote through their work at live music events and cultural gatherings. Additionally, HeadCount is partnered with March For Our Lives, having served as the lead voter registration organizer for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students’ nationwide bus tour. This summer, HeadCount also organized voter registration efforts on summer concert tours including Jay-Z and Beyonce; Macklemore and Kesha; Dave Matthews Band; the Vans Warped Tour; and many other musical artists.

They are now focused on get-out-the-vote initiatives, as many states have already begun their early voting periods for the 2018 midterm elections.

The music industry has once again gone through a tremendous transformation. Traditional roles in the business of creating music have been redefined and revolutionized. Picture the traditional scene of a music creation team in a studio--in attendance you may find the artist, the band, the manager, possibly the A&R rep of a label, the audio engineer, etc. Maybe you’ve hired a team of songwriters and curated a set of songs to record from their work. These roles are the traditional puzzle pieces required to produce good music. Now forget all of that. Consider what one person can accomplish musically on a Macbook alone. With a DAW (digital audio workstation) like Ableton or Fruity Loops, a few royalty-free sample packs, some cheap-to-free VSTs/Plugins, and a bit of a musical ear, the ‘laptop producer’ now has all the ingredients she needs to create commercially viable music.