Copyright can be used as a noun, verb or adjective and describes the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something. Previously in this blog, Carlos Alvarez from Azteca Records wrote a four-part series on music publishing.

Sound Exchange and The Recording Academy have partnered in advocating for legislation and educating the community about performance rights.

Introduced March 19, 2015 the Allocation for Music Producers Act or AMP Act (H.R. 1457) says this:

Before I continue, I wanted to mention briefly that I was just recently asked by a reader of this article of when should a writer expect to be paid his/her royalties.  The music publishing industry works on a quarterly basis when it comes to getting paid.  So for all royalties generated by the use of the song, the music publishers will receive royalty payments every quarter.

In my years as a music publisher I’ve had the honor of working with hit-songwriters to beginning songwriters, singer-songwriters and musician-songwriters.  Many of them have shared with me their journey and stories of dealing with music publishers, recording artists, record label executives, and their statements of mis-information and even worse. . . stories of unpaid royalties.

SoundExchange is the non-profit performance rights organization that collects royalties from satellite radio, internet radio, cable TV music channels and similar platforms for streaming sound recordings.  SoundExchangeis  the sole entity in the United States to collect and distribute these digital performance royalties for artists, master rights owners, and independent artists who record and own their masters.