A short guide to self-publishing: Should you or shouldn’t you?

By Nick Krewen

To self-publish or not to self-publish, that is the question. With apologies to Shakespeare, it seems that fledgling songwriters and recording artists find themselves in a quandary when it comes to forming their own publishing companies. They’ve scouted the credits of their favourite artists’ CDs, checked the publishing information and noticed that they all — with rare exceptions — have a company listed as a co-publisher. So surely, the newbie songwriters think, they should follow suit and form their own publishing company.

But before going through the trouble of establishing your own publishing imprint, ask yourself this: are your songs making you money? Because, according to SOCAN education and outreach manager Terry O’Brien, if they’re not bringing you an income, you should hold off. “Under SOCAN’s rules, you don’t have to have or be a publisher in order to get paid public-performance royalties in Canada,” explains O’Brien, a former VP of BMG Music Canada. “If your song earns $100 and you don’t have a publisher, you will get the $100.”

In other words, as long as you’re registered with SOCAN as a writer and there is no designated publisher, you will receive 100 percent of any royalties generated by the performance of your music: the 50 percent writer share and the 50 percent publisher share.

However, O’Brien says that for the majority of recording artists and composers, setting up their own publishing companies “is a matter of 'when' as opposed to 'if.' The job of publishing still needs to be done, and the publisher does two things: it administers the rights, which includes issuing licences, collecting money and distributing royalties — a key part to you getting paid,” he says. “Then, there is the creative side of publishing: trying to find new uses for the works, commoditizing the works and getting them out into the marketplace.”

So when should you form your own publishing company? O’Brien cites a number of scenarios. “When you are licensing music internationally, when you enter a sub-publishing deal or when you enter a co-publishing deal with a third-party publisher,” he says. “Another angle is if you’re going to be a music publisher yourself and actively sign other songwriters to your company.”

There’s another incentive. Before country singer and songwriter Brooke Miller signed a co-publishing deal with Sony ATV Music Canada, she formed Sparkle Plenty Music Ltd. in 2006, partly for legal protection and tax considerations. “Tax reasons, yes, but also just to have a ‘house’ for my music,” Miller explains. “I created Sparkle Plenty at the advice of my music lawyer, who was seeing me through the contract. Sparkle Plenty allowed me to secure a ‘home’ for the songs I was writing and releasing on albums.”

Before you establish your own publishing entity, call SOCAN. O’Brien explains: “We’ll do a name search, and once you’re cleared, you’ll register your business name with the government. We require a copy of that business-name registration, because once you have that, you can set up a business bank account. Our criteria with a publisher are that you have at least one commercially released song that’s been assigned to your company or five copyrights that have been assigned and that were written by a SOCAN member, a Canadian citizen who is a member of another society or a Canadian citizen in the process of joining SOCAN and/or another society. Send us the titles. Once the publishing company is set up, you no longer register songs as a writer. You register them as a publisher because that’s what the publisher does: all the administration.”

Once SOCAN approves the application — which will include a small administration fee — the membership department generates a contract, sends it out and awaits a return signature from the applicant. Keep in mind that any publishers you list will be sent a publisher-share statement.

O’Brien also advises publishers to look into membership with the CMRRA or SODRAC. “At some point, you want to investigate the CMRRA or SODRAC for your reproduction-rights licensing. If you’re licensing songs or someone is covering your songs on another label, most publishers will join up and have CMRRA or SODRAC do their licensing for them, including online licensing for reproduction rights.

“SOCAN and CMRRA/SODRAC are the organizations that publishers are going to be affiliated with for collecting because those are the two major streams of publishing royalties: performance and mechanicals.”

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