Carlos Alvarez is a record label executive at Azteca Music Group based out of Dallas, TX specializing in marketing for regional Mexican music. I met Carlos when we were both The Recording Academy - Texas Chapter board of governors and invited him to write a guest blog post about publishing. He is also a musician and member of the mariachi group Campanas de America.
In part I of this article I left out one exclusive right under Copyright law. . . on purpose of course. It is Digital Audio Transmission.
Basically referring to the new online & Satellite transmission of recordings, specifically, STREAMING (streaming audio, subscription-based entities). Examples: Pandora Radio, Sirius/XM, Spotify, etc. . .
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.
So lets chat more in detail about how and from what does the song make money from. How does the songwriter make; hmmm.....what’s that word again....ah yes, ROYALTY!!
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.