ION INDIE MAGAZINE February 2016, Volume 21 | Page 66

By Paul Bordenkircher
If you've followed our series in the magazine, you've gotten a quick education on copyright, and established yourself and your
publishing company with a Performing Rights Organization. Now that you're officially a publisher, it's time to deal with the
responsibilities you have with your precious music catalog: the task of record keeping.
Now let’s be honest here: keeping track of registrations, account numbers and contracts is the opposite of fun. But as recent
news articles and court cases have shown, it is critically important. In December 2015, Spotify was hit with a $150 million
class action lawsuit over improperly licensed music. And the crux of the argument has to do with poor record keeping.
Now, a key thing never to forget about songs is this: THEY’RE NOT REAL PROPERTY. That simply means they’re not a
physical object. If you invent the world’s greatest mouse trap, you can lock it away in a safe, so that no one can ever steal it
from you. Songs are expressions, ideas, concepts. Once they’re out there (released to the world), you can’t get it back. So
your entire world as a publisher is to do whatever you can to properly document it--creation, ownership, and all contracts and
documents related to it.
If you want to prove you built that mousetrap, you can pull it out of the safe and show it. When dealing with intellectual property,
there's no such thing as absolute proof of ownership. Enforcing--and sometimes, defending--your intellectual rights will come
down to how much proof can you pile up. So if you want to join a lawsuit like the one against Spotify, you’ll need to be able to
deliver that proof.
Record Keeping Basics
As I alluded to in earlier articles about publishers, part of their relationship with the writer is to handle the business aspects of
the song catalog. That will ultimately mean pitching, making deals, and collecting big sums of cash--but all of that cannot
happen until proper record keeping is secured.
The easy way to remember a publisher's responsibilities is: Promote, Protect and Collect. Let’s talk about each of them
individually.
Promotion should be obvious to you - getting your music out there. It can mean recording and releasing it yourself, but it will
often involve pitching your music to others. You may pitch a wide variety of places, such as movies, TV shows, commercials,
music libraries, even other recording artists, depending on the type of music you represent. Some will say yes, most will say
no. Keeping track of when and where songs are placed are critical to getting paid later. That leads us into….
Collection is the receipt, calculation and distribution of royalties. Do you have a good record of songwriters for each song,
their percentages, and contracted rates for each kind of usage licensed? You’ll need to keep track of each song’s income,
from what source, and who gets what. And don’t forget payments need to go out in a systematically periodic manner--usually
quarterly or semi-annually. Obviously a big job.
Protection involves keeping a detailed set of records regarding each song in the catalog. This becomes critical, should you
ever be forced to go to court over unauthorized usages (i.e., Spotify). Here’s the basic information every publisher needs to
maintain for each song in their catalog:
1. Registrations. A big part of the publisher's responsibilities is to register their creative works with the necessary organizations. That includes the PROs, the Copyright Office, publishing agreements and more. We discussed that in the previous post. For songs, each one should have a unique number related to each registration. For my wife’s songs, it includes
one for ASCAP, one for the US Copyright Office. Some of her songs which fall into the Christian genre should also be