Music Publishing Explained: Where the Money Lives and How It Gets There
- Matt Errington
- Apr 17
- 10 min read
By Matt Errington - music industry educator and co-founder of Xpandr, currently teaching music business strategy to artists and emerging publishing, management, and label professionals across the UK.
Music publishing manages the composition copyright in a song - the melody and lyrics - separately from the sound recording. It generates income across four streams: performance royalties, mechanical royalties, sync licensing, and print rights. Each stream flows through a different collection body before reaching the songwriter and their publisher. If no publisher is registered, part of that income goes uncollected.
A few years ago, I was speaking with a manager who had been doing the job properly for nearly a decade - sharp, well-connected, good instincts. We were talking through one of her artists, a songwriter who had three tracks placed in the same Netflix series in a single year. The sync fees had been solid. I asked how the backend performance royalties were looking.
She paused. She knew the term. She just hadn't thought to chase it.
That's not a criticism - she was, and still is, excellent at her job. In fact, I built a lot of my own practice learning from her! It's more an observation about how publishing tends to work in practice: you can be genuinely experienced in this industry and still find specific corners of this that aren't quite as sharp as you'd like them to be. Publishing is layered in a way very few other parts of the business are, and the gaps tend to show up exactly when they're most expensive.
What follows is a working map of the publishing side of the picture - the compositions side - not an attempt to cover everything. We have an incredible Music Publishing, Sync and Licensing course with Steve Farris for that. But this should be enough to make the important things clear, correct a few things that circulate as half-truths, and give you a solid foundation to ask better questions.
What are the two copyrights in every song?
Before anything else, hold on to this very clearly: Every recorded song contains two entirely separate copyrights. That’s where I start most conversations that have anything to do with rights, royalties or registrations. My past and present students will testify to this!
1. The master recording - the actual audio file, the recorded performance - is typically owned by a record label or, increasingly, the artist themselves.
2. The musical composition - the underlying song: the melody and the lyrics - is what music publishing deals with. It is an entirely separate right. It can be owned solely by the songwriter, assigned to a publisher, or shared between them.
Same song. Two rights. Two income streams. Two different sets of people getting paid for two different things.
The diagram below maps both sides from an artist/writer perspective - the compositions side on the left and the recordings side on the right. For the rest of this article, we are working with the left. Understanding it clearly is, in practice, the thing that unlocks the most not just for a writer, but in a publishing career too.
Where does music publishing money come from?
There are four main income streams from a musical composition. An active catalogue generates all four simultaneously - in different amounts, through different routes, collected by different bodies. The four connected areas that define publishing income are: performance royalties, mechanical royalties, sync licensing, and print and grand rights.
What are performance royalties in music?
Generated every time a song is publicly performed or broadcast: radio, TV, streaming, live shows, background music in a venue. In the UK, PRS for Music collects these. In the US, it is ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC depending on affiliation.
Performance royalties split into two halves: the writer's share and the publisher's share. PRS defaults to a 50/50 split unless specific terms are registered against a work.
Here is where precision matters - because this is one of the most consistently muddled areas in the whole system.
Your writer's share is paid directly to you by PRS. That is protected - a publisher does not handle it, filter it, or pass it on to you. It comes directly to you as the registered songwriter.
The publisher's share is separate, and this is where things get costly for songwriters who are not paying attention. If no publisher is registered against a work, PRS holds back the publisher's share. It does not pay it to the writer. It waits until the work is formally registered with a publisher. That money exists. It is sitting in a queue waiting for a destination.
PRS does not pay the publisher's share into the void. It holds it – and it keeps holding it until the work is properly registered. The money is there. It just has nowhere to go.
Registering directly as a PRS publisher member is not a simple step - PRS requires evidence of at least 15 registered works and a demonstrable publishing operation before granting publisher membership. For many songwriters, the practical route to collecting the publisher's share is through an admin publishing service - Sentric, Songtrust, TuneCore Publishing - which register works on your behalf and pass the publisher's share through to you for a fee, 10 to 25% during the term. No ownership transfer, no long-term obligation.
The scale of performance royalties varies enormously. According to PRS for Music, an A-list slot on BBC Radio 2 generates approximately £1,000 per week in gross performance royalties for a four-minute track at roughly 25 plays per week. PRS for Music data also shows you need approximately 200,000 Spotify streams to generate the equivalent of a single Radio 2 play in performance royalty value. And honestly, that gap really matters when you are thinking about where meaningful publishing income actually comes from.
Managers working with songwriters need to understand this structure clearly - it sits at the heart of how publishing income flows alongside everything else in an artist's career. If you are building towards an artist management career, it connects directly to how music managers work in practice.
What are mechanical royalties in music?
Triggered when a composition is reproduced - physically on vinyl or CD, or digitally via download and streaming. In the UK, collected by MCPS, which operates as part of PRS for Music. In the US, the Mechanical Licensing Collective handles digital mechanicals following the Music Modernization Act of 2018.
One stream, two payments: streaming generates both a performance royalty and a mechanical royalty simultaneously. If a composition is not registered correctly for both, income gets missed - and across multiple platforms and territories, that gap compounds quickly.
What is sync licensing in music?
The licensing of a composition for use alongside moving image - TV, film, advertising, video games, online content. The most variable income stream in publishing, and in many catalogues, the one capable of producing the highest single-deal value.
Two things make sync fundamentally different from the other streams.
First: there is no statutory rate. A sync fee is entirely negotiated. It can be a few hundred pounds or well into six figures, depending on the project, the territory, the duration, how central the track is to the scene, and who is doing the negotiating.
Second: a sync requires clearance of both copyrights - the master recording and the musical composition. Both rights holders need to agree. If a song has four co-writers who have each assigned their shares to different publishers, every one of them needs to sign off. There are no workarounds.
"One percent of ownership carries one right of refusal on a sync. That is not a technicality - it can kill a deal."
I sat in on a placement conversation once where a track had been selected, the creative team loved it, the budget was in place - and the whole thing stalled because one co-writer's share had moved to a small publisher in another territory whose admin team was slow to respond. The music supervisor moved on. It went to a different track. Nobody had done anything wrong. The ownership chain had not been mapped clearly enough, and by the time it was, the moment had passed.
The sync deal itself has two components: the upfront sync fee and the backend performance royalties that accrue whenever the content airs. A well-placed track in a long-running series keeps paying for years after the original negotiation - which is why clean registration and clear ownership matter long after a deal is signed.
What are print and grand rights?
Print rights cover the reproduction of sheet music and lyrics. Grand rights govern the use of compositions in theatrical productions - musicals, opera, stage shows. For catalogues built around enduring compositions, these are meaningful income streams worth knowing.
If you want to build a career working within this system - managing rights, structuring deals, advising on sync, navigating the full publishing ecosystem - Steve Farris leads Xpandr's Music Publishing, Sync and Licensing course for people who want to do exactly that.
How do music publishing royalties get paid?
PRS pays the writer's share directly to the songwriter and the publisher's share directly to the registered publisher - as two separate payments. The publisher never handles the writer's share. In a co-publishing deal, a publisher may contractually agree to pass a portion of their own publisher's share back to the songwriter on top of that - but that is a negotiated arrangement, not how the default system works.
Internationally, the chain extends. A song generating income in Japan is collected by JASRAC, which passes it to PRS, which passes it to the registered songwriter and publisher. Sub-publishing agreements exist for exactly this - a UK publisher maintains deals across major territories to ensure royalties collected abroad do not get stranded or eroded before they arrive.
For authoritative detail on how PRS distributes royalties across different usage types, the PRS for Music distribution policy is the primary reference.
Registration is, in practice, one of the most important things in publishing. Not the creative work, not the pitch strategy, not even the deal structure - the registration. Get it wrong and royalties generate but do not arrive.
What types of music publishing deal exist?
Publishing deals sit on a spectrum from light-touch to full commitment.
An administration deal is the most hands-off arrangement: the songwriter retains full copyright ownership, and the publisher handles registration and royalty collection for a fee of 10 to 25% during the term. No ownership transfer. When the term ends, so does the fee.
A co-publishing deal goes further. The songwriter assigns 50% of their publishing share to the publisher in exchange for an advance and more active support - sync pitching, co-writing connections, catalogue development. The detail that often gets glossed over: the publisher's share in a co-publishing arrangement can persist beyond the end of the deal term - sometimes indefinitely. What looks like a short-term arrangement can have long-term consequences for how a catalogue earns. Worth understanding clearly before signing, not discovering after.
A full publishing deal transfers the complete publishing copyright to the publisher. These are rarer than they once were and more negotiable when they do appear - but they exist, and knowing what they mean for long-term income is essential for anyone advising on or structuring them.
What careers exist in music publishing - and where do they lead?
Music publishing is not one job. It is an ecosystem with genuine range: copyright managers, sync executives, publishing A&R, licensing coordinators, royalty analysts, sub-publishing managers, catalogue strategists. The breadth of career paths within it surprises most people when they first look at this part of the industry seriously.
What has changed in the last decade is where those careers live.
Publishing used to mean a handful of major players and a cluster of independents. It still does - but the landscape has expanded significantly. Streaming has created sustained demand for people who understand how digital royalty flows work. Sync has professionalised and grown into one of the most strategically complex parts of the business. Technology companies with vast music libraries now employ publishing teams as large as some traditional publishers.
Students from Xpandr's publishing programmes now hold senior positions at Kobalt, at major production music houses, at broadcaster licensing departments across the UK, at tech platforms with music rights at their core - including roles at Meta's music partnerships division and global TV production companies that licence music across dozens of territories. Some of those roles did not exist five years ago. The knowledge base is the same. The contexts keep expanding.
"The students who move fastest in publishing careers are not the ones who know the most terminology. They are the ones who understand how the money actually moves - and why registration is where it starts."
If a career in publishing is where you are headed - whether in rights management, sync, licensing, or the broader music industry - the Breaking In course covers the full landscape of how music industry careers are built from the ground up, including publishing as a career pathway.
Publishing exists to make sure the people who created something get paid - properly, consistently, and wherever in the world that something is being heard. It’s important, and it’s why I’m so passionate about it myself.
Author: Matt Errington is a music industry educator and co-founder of Xpandr. He currently teaches music business strategy to emerging publishing professionals, managers, and industry practitioners across the UK.
Book a call with Matt: If you want to talk through where publishing fits into your career plans - or whether the course is the right next step for you - you can book a free call directly. Book a time that works for you
Sources and further reading
PRS for Music - Understanding Publishing Rights The primary UK reference for how performance royalties split between writer and publisher, and how PRS handles unregistered publisher shares. prsformusic.com
PRS for Music - Publisher Joining Criteria Covers what's required to register as a publisher member directly with PRS, including the 15-work minimum threshold. prsformusic.com
The Ivors Academy - Writer's Share vs Publisher's Share A clean, UK-focused explanation of how the two shares work and who receives what - useful companion reading to this piece. ivorsacademy.com
Sync Song Writer - Sync Fees and Royalties Explained Breaks down the two-part structure of sync income: upfront fee and backend performance royalties. syncsongwriter.com
AC Freedman Law - Co-Publishing vs Admin Deals Detailed legal perspective on the differences between deal types, including what persists beyond the deal term in a co-pub arrangement. acfreedmanlaw.com
Go deeper with Xpandr
Music Publishing, Sync and Licensing The ten-hour course led by Steve Farris covering everything this article introduces - rights management, deal structures, sync strategy, and how to build a career. xpandr.co/music-publishing
Breaking In
For anyone earlier in the journey - a complete guide to how music industry careers are built, including publishing as a career pathway. xpandr.co/breaking-in
Manager Pro For managers who want a sharper understanding of how publishing income fits into the broader picture of an artist's career. xpandr.co/manager-pro
