Publication Rights

Who has the Publication Rights?

If there was ever an area of copyright law that gets murky and confusing, it’s probably in publication rights.

What publication rights literally means is that the holder of those rights is allowed to, well, publish. This holds true in music, film, literature, etcetera. With the majority of mainstream, published work, believe it or not, these rights do not always go to the artist.

Rather, there is a sort of trade off with artists and publisher’s rights. Usually, a record label will hold publishing rights, in exchange for providing the artist with instruments, a recording studio, marketing, booking, distribution and so on. The artist will then receive a percentage of the net profits, with the publisher taking on certain responsibilities to make the deal worth the artist’s while.

For example, most musicians, when they are first starting out, do not have millions of dollars to pump into marketing. They don’t have the contacts to get music videos on MTV or even get a single onto the radio. Most radio stations actually sell airtime to music publishers, rather than just letting the DJ play whatever they like, and there just aren’t many musicians who can afford to pay for those playing fees, or rather, they cannot afford to pay those fees to every major radio station within the US, and then also pay for those fees in other countries, etcetera.

Besides financial backing, something that publishers provide artist’s with is the willingness and ability to eat the costs if the record does not sell very well. A musician might be able to get some money together and self-publish a CD, but this means that, if the CD doesn’t sell, then they’ve just blown a lot of money. For a big music label, honestly, blowing a bunch of money isn’t such a big deal, or at least, not as big a deal as it is for an individual “starving artist” type.

On the other hand, if an artist is good enough, and has a neat idea for how to market his own work, plenty of artists in the past have managed to sell tons of copies while retaining the publishing rights to themselves. One of the most famous examples would be Robert Crumb, who published his own comics at a cost to himself, and wound up with one of the biggest followings any comic artist has ever had. Frank Zappa would be another one. Nobody was willing to publish his music, so he had to start his own record company just to distribute his music. Even the Ninja Turtles, multi-million dollar empire that they are, began as just one small self-published comic books.

But there’s also the story of Gary Wilson. Gary Wilson was a musician in the 1970’s who recorded some music and then gathered up whatever money he could to print some records. Never heard of Gary Wilson? Well, there you go. His music didn’t sell well enough to really allow him to make a living as a musician, and today he works in an adult book store just to make ends meet. This wasn’t a problem with the quality of his music. Wilson was mentored by the legendary composer John Cage, and his self-published album had an immense impact on several of today’s most celebrated artists, including Beck. For some reason or another, though, the market just wasn’t there for his kind of music to sell very well.

Today, you have a couple of options if you’d like to retain publishing rights. One is that you can self publish on CDs, or go to a small print shop and have copies of your novels printed, etcetera. You can print enough to go around, at least, with a small loan or even your tax return money, and sell copies through a distributor or from the trunk of your car or online, etcetera. Your other option is to publish online, and only have to pay enough to maintain a website (which isn’t much if you know how to design a website yourself).

Even in the age of self-publication, you can still get a lot out of selling your publication rights, though. Even with the internet, most artists just don’t have the marketing muscle of say, SONY BGM. It really does come down to the artist’s decision, though. You have more freedom when you publish yourself, but you have to work that much harder.