How to Have Your Hit Song Published - Revised & Updated

How to Have Your
Hit Song Published
Jay Warner
Revised and Updated Edition

Copyright © 1978, 1980, 1988, 2006 by Jay Warner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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Neither the author nor Hal Leonard is responsible for URLs that may have expired
or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Jacket design by Kristi Montague.
Book interior by Snow Creative Services.
Published by Hal Leonard Corporation
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warner, Jay.
How to have your hit song published / Jay Warner. – 4th ed., updated and rev.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4234-1199-4
ISBN-10: 1-4234-1199-4
1. Popular music—Writing and publishing. I. Title.
MT67.W26 2006
070.5’794—dc22
2006026157
Printed in the United States of America
Fourth Edition
Hal Leonard books are available at your local bookstore, or you may order through
Music Dispatch at 1-800-637-2852 or www.musicdispatch.com.

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
ix
xi
Chapter 1 A General History of Publishing in America 1
Chapter 2 What Is Publication? 7
Chapter 3 Copyrights, Copyrighting, and You 11
Chapter 4
Performing Rights Societies: When and Why You
Need Them 23
Chapter 5 How to Choose a Performing Rights Society 29
Chapter 6 The Current Copyright Law 47
Chapter 7 How to Present Your Song 59
Chapter 8 How to Pick a Publishing Company 83
Chapter 9 How a Publishing Company Works 91
Chapter 10 How to Make Publishing Contacts 107
Chapter 11 How to Run Your Own Songs 129
Chapter 12 How to Publish Your Own Songs 149
Chapter 13 Basic Songwriter Agreements and Licenses 173
Chapter 14 Different Types of Publishing Deals 217
Chapter 15 Subpublishing, Foreign Markets, and Your Songs 245
Chapter 16 Writer and Publisher Industry Problems and Challenges 267
Chapter 17 New Technologies and Their Effects on the Songwriter 283
A Final Note 297

viii
Contents
Appendices
I Music Publishers 299
II Songwriter Showcases 307
III Licensing Societies 309
IV Record Companies 311
V Producers, Engineers, Mixers 323
VI Record Distributors 337
VII Music Industry Attorneys 339
VIII Music Supervisors 353
IX Film/TV Music Departments and Supervisors 357
X Songwriter Associations — Domestic and Foreign 361
XI Music Libraries 365
XII International Subpublishers 371
Glossary 385
References 389
Index 391
About the Author 399

Introduction
When I wrote the first edition of this work, I was a wide-eyed, twentysomething
adventure-seeking music publisher who’d convinced his boss,
the legendary Wes Farrell, that he needed me more in California then in
my frozen wasteland homeland, New York City.
I accomplished this through no great strategy on my own, but by a quirk
of Big Apple fate. We walked down Broadway together in the winter of
1976 and a gust of wind took me (on three bounces) from West 46th Street
to nearly the end of West 45th Street, where I ducked into a storefront with
visions of being blown into traffic, thus depriving Wes of his professional
manager. About a minute later the six-foot, handsome “boy wonder” (as the
business referred to him), who could charm the skirt off a nun, sauntered
by, laughing at my flight down the Great White Way. I was embarrassed
and indignant at his reaction, but my own, though now fateful and historic
in my mind, was at the time a mindless rant of “Okay, laughing boy
wonder, move me to L.A. or I’m quitting!” Immediately I thought, “You just
killed your career because you can’t handle a New York wind.” But Wes just
laughed and said, “You really want to come to La-La Land? Sure, I can use
you out there.”
Within four months (May 1976), Farrell had kept his promise and I
was actually living on the left coast. I recount this tale because I firmly
believe this book never would have been written if I hadn’t moved to Los
Angeles. The rock ’n’ roll scene was still vibrant out West. L.A. was magical
to a lifelong New Yorker and what they called a storm here was basically
a drizzle in Brooklyn. I thought, “All things are possible here,” although I
couldn’t imagine at the time what was to come. I spent the next year not
only working our catalog of songs, but learning as much as I could about
the inner workings of publishing, licensing, copyrights, the law, and how to
build and maintain relations with writers.
This wasn’t an easy thing in the pre-Internet Age, where books on the
subject were nonexistent and I found that the business’s very nature was
that of a cornucopia of hidden secrets. In other words, publishers didn’t
like to let the public, or even the artists and writers, know the behind the
scenes activities of this seemingly mundane, but actually “gold in them
there copyrights” industry. I remember thinking, “God, we’re the actuaries

xii
How to Have Your Hit Song Published
of entertainment.” Soon I realized that the only way to really learn this
business in the ’70s was to be in the business and learn from the contacts
and experiences one garners while doing the day-to-day routine. I especially
queried pros in publishing at every chance, kept extensive logs on
meetings and began formalizing more simplified methods of getting as
many songs to prospective producers, artists, and managers as possible.
Lest you think at this point that this was strictly for a noble purpose
and the fulfillment acquiring knowledge brings, it was also for survival as
I felt the more I was indispensable to my company the less likely to find
myself unemployed in a strange land.
The day of destiny arrived in early 1977. Wes brought me into a meeting
with two producers who we were negotiating with for their act. Also in
the meeting was one of Farrell’s executives, Joe Smit. While Wes charmed
them into the comfort zone of confidence that we were the best record
machine since Motown Records, I was there to convince them that we
would be a great promoter of their songs.
When the meeting was over I walked down the hall with Smit behind
me. He walked in my office and smiled. I said, “What?” and he responded,
“You really covered the bases. They were knocked out. You ought to write
a book!” I said, “Yeah, right, I haven’t got enough to do here. All I did was
give myself a lot more work for the company.” He answered coyly, “So
you’re saying you can’t write a book on publishing, huh?” Well, Brooklyn
boys grow up to be suckers for a dare, and this confident newcomer was no
exception.
I said, “I could write a book if I wanted to but I just don’t have the time.”
Joe kept at me off and on for a few months and slowly, I started putting
together ideas on how I’d do what hadn’t ever been done except for highly
complex papers written by lawyers on copyright law. If I was going to do
this, I reasoned, I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone know until I was sure
I wouldn’t fall on my face.
I decided that I should use not being an entertainment lawyer to my
advantage. The book would have to be written by a publisher with a songwriting
mentality in layman’s terms and its niche would be a work for
the masses, easy to understand, and practical with charts, diagrams, lists
of contacts, forms, simplified royalty flow charts, maps of the key music
meccas and where the companies were, form contracts, and explanations
paragraph by paragraph, etc. It was really intended to be a primer on what
to do with your songs after you wrote them. I rationalized, I’ll leave it to
others to teach them how to write a hit song.
By the spring, Joe told me he and his wife were moving to the country,
something he’d always wanted to do and he was going to set up his own
book publishing company. Well, you know where that led and, in 1978, the

Introduction
xiii
first edition of How to Have Your Hit Song Published came out complete
with a front cover photo of what was laughingly referred to by the staff as
“the War Zone,” actually my office desk piled high with papers, licenses,
tapes, records, acetates, sheet music, and charts. I wanted to clean it up,
but Joe felt the mass was indicative of what it was to be a real publisher,
someone who wears numerous hats in a quest to find and exploit the next
Bruce Springsteen or the next “Blinded by the Light.”
Twenty-eight consecutive years in print later and now in its fourth edition
I’m proud and pleased that both the book and I have gotten this far.
I guess you should never underestimate the power of simplicity.

CHAPTER
4
Performing Rights Societies:
When and Why You Need Them
Public performance royalties of recorded music are the greatest source
of income in the music industry. These performance royalties are
based on a percentage scale and are collected by BMI, ASCAP, and
SESAC, the three major collection agencies in the United States. Writers in
the U.S. must belong to one (and only one) of these agencies in order to collect
royalties for airplay of their songs in the United States. Furthermore,
these licensing organizations are set up (either through affiliates or companies
with whom they have a licensing agreement) to collect royalties on
airplay outside the United States. The U.S. Congress came up with its first
statute covering royalty payment in 1897, but this had little bearing on
songwriters’ income, because copyright owners weren’t organized enough
to collect royalties for the use of music from such sources as cabarets and
dance halls.
The following is a short history of the Copyright Act and its bearing on
writers and publishers, and how the performing rights societies have been
a guiding force since 1914. The United States Copyright Act of 1909 was a
reasonably good and fair bill for that era, giving American composers, lyricists,
and publishers most of the benefits and protection enjoyed by their
colleagues in other lands. The Act reflected the pre–World War I technology
that affected music performances and delivery of those performances
to the public. At that time, there were no radio, television, music systems,
cable TV, satellites, and jukeboxes, let alone the twenty-first-century technologies.
The term of copyright protection, built into the 1909 statute, was
significantly shorter than that of most other countries, but there was little
argument, because America’s creators were so glad to get copyright protection
for nondramatic performance rights and recording rights. In 1909,
the U.S. got a law, but it still did not get any royalties. No one respected
our performing rights until ASCAP was founded in 1914 by writers and
publishers who organized to get the statute enforced.

24 How to Have Your Hit Song Published
Actually the law was not widely enforced until January 1917, when
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in ASCAP’s favor in a crucial suit brought
by one of ASCAP’s founding fathers, Victor Herbert, against Chandley’s
Restaurant in New York. The years passed, the technology changed, and
the world of music evolved, to the delight of expanding audiences everywhere.
The statute remained the same, however.
By the 1920s, some members of Congress recognized that the Copyright
Act of 1909 was unrealistic and began to discuss changes to modernize the
obviously obsolete legislation. Laws were passed to remedy economic inequities
affecting larger groups, but composers and lyricists had to wait at the
end of the line. The obsolete law survived unchanged; everyone recognized
American music as both a major cultural and economic force, and it was
widely admitted that music was probably our first ambassador internationally.
Technology changed at an ever-increasing rate, but the level of
copyright protection remained frozen in 1909 terms.
Fortunately, the courts first interpreted the old law reasonably and
applied it to new uses, particularly to radio and television. Later, beginning
in 1968, the trend was reversed when cable television was held exempt. No
one could explain why lyricists, composers, and music publishers should
fall behind or be treated as second-class citizens, but no one could deny
those realities, either.
In 1955, Congress funded a series of studies by the Copyright Office.
It took nine long years for the first copyright modernization bill of this
generation to be introduced. In 1967, the House of Representatives passed
a bill that wasn’t perfect, but which would have done much to remedy some
of the major inequities. The Senate never got to vote on this bill, and it died.
The effort to get a fair bill didn’t die, however. On February 19, 1976,
twenty-one years after the Copyright Office studies were funded by
Congress, fifteen years after they were completed and had demonstrated
the areas in which new legislation was needed, and twelve years after the
first revision bill was introduced, the Senate unanimously passed a bill that
became law on January 1, 1978.
The 1909 law had broad exclusions that limited copyright protection to
public performances for profit. The new law has removed the “for profit”
limitation and substituted exemptions for specific situations, such as religious
services. The 1909 law created one compulsory license that had long
oppressed creators, the proviso that arbitrarily set the recording royalty
for a record at $.02 per record. After sixty-seven years without increase,
Congress raised that rate to $.0275.
Anyone familiar with the great rise in living costs since 1909 will
understand why ASCAP and BMI urged a significantly larger increase in
this mechanical rate.

Performing Rights Societies 25
That brings us to the present. (For details of the current copyright law,
see chapter 6.) To give you an idea of the growth of performing rights societies,
ASCAP writer membership has gone from 13,500 in 1970 to 18,000
in 1977, and to 28,000 in 1988. By 2005, ASCAP had a membership association
of more than 148,000 composers, songwriters, and lyricists.
BMI writer membership went up from approximately 10,000 in 1963 to
over 32,000 in 1977, and 50,000 in 1988. By the mid-1990s, BMI overtook
ASCAP as the society with the most members. As of 2005, BMI represents
more than 300,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers in all
genres of music.
Publisher membership in both societies has also grown. By 1988,
ASCAP had 10,000 and BMI 30,000 publisher members. Today ASCAP
has more than 80,000 publisher members.
ASCAP has continually increased its collected performance fees, going
from $38 million in 1963 to $161 million in 1982, and by 1986 their collection
fees totaled over $252 million, more than six times the figures of
1963. In 2004, their performance fees equaled more than $699 million
(before overhead deductions). ASCAP had a 14.9% increase in 2004. Of
ASCAP’s $610 million revenue, over $206 million was from overseas. On
average, ASCAP pays out about $.86 to writers and publishers for every
dollar it receives. ASCAP’s overhead is about 13.5% while BMI’s is about
14.5%. In 2005, ASCAP again exceeded its previous revenues for writers
and publishers earning more than $749 million (before overhead deductions).
Domestic revenue reached an all time high of $534.5 million with
international revenue of almost $215 million.
ASCAP’s domestic distribution totaled $440.4 million with royalties
from foreign distribution totaling $205.5 million. Their overhead reached
an all-time low of 12.5%, reportedly the lowest of any copyright organization
in the world. ASCAP also had a record number of 113 million performances
of musical works In 2005, mostly from land-based radio, satellite
radio, ringtones, the Internet, cable, and local TV, and digital jukeboxes.
BMI’s fiscal 2004–2005 revenues were more than $728 million, an
increase of over 8.3% over the previous year. It was the first time that any
copyright organization in the world had earned over $700 million in a year.
The number was over $56 million more than the previous year. Of the
total, more than $623 million was distributed to publishers, writers, and
composers, an increase of almost $51 million from the previous year. It was
the fifteenth straight year of increasing gross and net royalty payouts.
Adding to the growth of the industry, new-media licensing revenues
rose by 114% over the previous year, totaling $11.4 million. Revenue from
mobile entertainment (i.e., ringtones) scored the largest increase, almost
190% more than the previous year, at $4 million. Showing a trend away

26 How to Have Your Hit Song Published
from illegal sources, BMI licensed more than 500 new digital-music providers,
including Sprint PCS, Rhapsody, and Mobzilla. Of the $728 million
gross, more than $202 million came from overseas, while the domestic
general licensing area grew by 12.7% due to restaurants, skating rinks,
aerobic and fitness centers, and new contracts with Muzak, the background
music service.
Responding to the new technology fields, all three societies have
instituted new licenses for the Internet and mobile phone industries.
ASCAP offers three types of Internet licenses: a noninteractive license
that doesn’t allow downloading, an interactive license that allows music
buyers to download, and a third license that authorizes public performance
of songs in wireless devices such as mobile phones. BMI’s main
Internet license type is one where fees are computed on a “gross revenue
calculation” where music is the main feature of the particular site.
SESAC offers a license that provides for payment based on the number of
monthly page requests, as well as the amount of advertising on the site.
Founded in 1930, SESAC, the second-oldest performing rights agency
in the U.S, now boasts that they are the fastest-growing performing rights
agency in America. However, SESAC does not disclose its numbers of writers,
publishers, or income, and is privately owned, unlike its counterparts
ASCAP and BMI.
Today, performing rights societies collect most of their licensing income
from TV, all forms of radio use of recorded music, and the performance of
music in films in movie theaters overseas. A smaller amount is acquired
by Internet uses, wired-music sources such as Muzak and major concerts,
malls, restaurants, skating rinks, and any public use of licensed music.
As of January 1, 1978, jukeboxes and cable TV were also licensed for use.
Areas long closed to publishers and writers are now open, and the new
technologies look to be areas of increasing income in the future.
Since performing rights societies were formed primarily to provide a
service that individuals could not perform for themselves, including collecting
royalties for writers and publishers as payment for the use of their
music, it is quite obvious why an association with one of these societies
would be to the advantage of anyone seriously trying to make a go of it as
a writer or publisher. It would be genuinely impossible for individuals to
negotiate a license as well as monitor their songs use with every possible
user of their copyrighted work(s) in this country, let alone in foreign countries.
Still, the association with these societies is voluntary, not mandatory,
and the time to choose joining one is up to you.
The most appropriate time to join a licensing society is upon (or shortly
after) the actual publication or use of your composition, whether it be
as a record release, film use, TV performance, or concert performance.

Performing Rights Societies 27
The societies do not accept full membership prior to publication of a
writer’s first work, as too often dates change or publication or use never
takes effect.
Don’t worry about losing any income credits from these first uses. The
societies are monitoring compositions in a catchall system and are usually
making payment on performances established anywhere from nine months
to a year prior to their current payment period. For example, if a society
were making payment to a writer at the end of the second quarter of 2005
(see chapter 5, “How to Choose a Performing Rights Society,” for how often
writers are paid), it would be for the airplay or performances logged from a
period usually nine months previous (the third quarter of 2004).
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should wait nine months to register
your compositions and yourself as a writer with the society of your
choice. The sooner after publication or use that your representation is in
place, the less likely the opportunity for mistakes to arise.