Music Distribution and Music Publishing are two different businesses revolving around two entirely different copyrights that generate entirely different royalty streams:
- Music Distribution is the business of collecting royalties for Sound Recordings (recordings of songs)
- Music Publishing is the business of collecting royalties for Compositions (songs written)
Who gets paid from licensed use of sound recordings?
Performers/Artists and the money is usually collected by a record label or distributor.
Who gets paid from licensed use of musical compositions?
Songwriters and composers and the money is usually collected by a publishing administrator.
TuneCore provides both services under one roof allowing for maximum parity between the copyrights.
When you distribute a record through TuneCore, you are sending a sound recording to over 160 different stores worldwide and TuneCore is paying through 100% of the royalties for that recording to the account owner. However, there are multiple other royalties derived from the use of the underlying composition which, unless you are signed up for TuneCore Publishing Administration, you are potentially not collecting. This is additional revenue to that collected by a Performing Rights Organization (PRO) such as BMI, ASCAP and SESAC who only collect performance royalties for the composition.
Unless you have a publishing administrator there is a 100% chance that you are not collecting money from the distribution of the songs you wrote - don’t leave your publishing on the table!