Without a doubt, publishing is an integral part of any songwriter’s career. But what does the future hold for the industry? One could argue that the trends we see today across the publishing business are not that different from what we see on the recording label side. 20 years ago, “artist” deals were a norm across both recording and publishing.
Record labels would sign an artist, take a massive stake in the master, and invest heavily in costly recording process and release promotion. A successful musician without a label was, basically, unimaginable. Songwriters, in their turn, would sign a full-publishing deal in the hopes of getting their songs on the radio — there’s where the money was.
Nowadays, the power has shifted from the label/publisher to the artist/songwriters. The new digital music industry is a place of self-promotion and self-production. The success story in the music industry used to be about 10 songwriters carefully engineering a top-40 song in the major-run studio. Now, it’s a bedroom producer/rapper duo coming up with a viral hit in their home studio.
A&R-focused co-publishing deals are still widespread, but more and more songwriters are shifting to pure administration deals — mirroring the “distribution-only” trend of the recording business. The “think like a start-up” approach is becoming more and more popular across both publishing and recording, pushing creators to consider the long term value of staying independent as opposed to signing their catalog off to the corporates.
However, even the most independent of songwriters can't do without publishing administration — just like the most independent of the recording artists can’t do without a distribution deal.
The new generation of administration-first publishing companies (like Kobalt or Downtown Music Publishing’s Songtrust) have scaled thanks to this shift. This new breed of publishing companies is a lot like distributors on the recording side, building their services around a well-oiled, automated collection pipeline.
Now, the distributor’s shift to label services is a hot topic across the recording industry. In a way, you could see the same thing happening in the publishing business. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company like Songtrust making a move into publishing promotion space, or a new type of songwriter management companies popping up to mirror growing artist management operation.
Source: songcharts.com