Music Publishing and Administration

Overall we provide publishing administration for Canadian musicians. I designed ATAM Productions to meet my own publishing needs, and quickly expanded to help out other musicians.

This approach of Publishing Administration provides several advantages over co-publishing or various 360-deals. A breakdown comparing the differences between these two types of deals follows below:

Publishing Administration:

  • Musical Equity: Music has value. Composers should retain that value. The best part about a publishing administration deal is that you are not transferring partial or total ownership of your songs to a third party so at the end of the day you retain 100 percent control for your music.
  • Freedom: If something isn’t working the way you like you can hire a new publishing administrator. Nothing is keeping you locked to one service provider, which generally makes the service provider more aware of your needs.
  • Other approved uses: You shouldn’t have to worry about how your song is used after you sign any sort of deal. With an administration deal any use must be approved by you.
  • Which slice of the pie?

    Since advances are not built into an administration deal you will ordinarily get a larger percentage of income than you would receive with co-publishing deals.

    • Co-publishing:

  • Musical Equity: Having a major corporation co-own the rights of your song aligns their interests with yours which may not be the best thing for the value of your music.
  • Freedom: Generally you are locked in with your co-publisher for the life of your copyrights, or the most financially favourable amount of time (for the co-publisher) that the co-publisher can manage.
  • Professional Gamblers: When a major corporation gives you a large publishing advance they are making a bet that you will earn much more money than they are giving you in the first place. When you accept a large advance you are making a bet against yourself. If the major record labels didn’t win tonnes of these bets than they would have gone bankrupt by now!
  • Which slice of the pie?
    When the co-publisher calculates how much to pay for an advance they first take out charges for the following
    1) The interest cost of paying you an advance
    2) The cost of the administration of your work
    3) The cost of recovering money given to other artists who failed to achieve as much sales as their advance dictated.
  • The tax man always rings twice. . . at minimum: Depending on the amount of money involved in the deal, receiving a lump-sum advance as opposed to receiving a steady flow of royalties may have negative tax and or commission consequences.