The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 21: Income Strategies for Modern Songwriters
Unlock the secrets to transforming your songwriting passion into a thriving career as I explore the multifaceted world of how songwriters make money through royalties and income diversification. Ever wondered how songwriters make money beyond just selling their tunes? Tune in to discover the intricate dance between performance royalties, mechanical rights, and the power of copyright. Allow me to guide you through the traditional paths of earning, showing how correct registration ensures that songwriters get their due. But that's just the beginning—learn how the digital age has reshaped the landscape, offering new realms for financial success.
In today's evolving music industry, writing songs can lead to a variety of optionality when it comes to how they're used and who uses them. I identify innovative platforms like Voclio and Vocalfy, which open up fresh opportunities for licensing and buyouts. I also delve into how collaborations and tapping into unused song ideas can lead to unexpected revenue streams. Whether you're penning tracks for others or crafting production music, diversification is your best friend. Join me as I unravel these strategies and much more whilst empowering songwriters to fully capitalize on their creative efforts while navigating the ever-changing musical tides of the mid-2020s.
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy Hello everybody and a warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, jonny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, which is available in hardback, paperback, ebook format in all the major bookstores and online. I'm a music creator with credits on a variety of major and indie labels, as either a writer or a producer. I'm also a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of the community around it. I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business behind music.
Speaker 1:Okay, so today we're talking about how songwriters actually make money. So there are a few different aspects to this, and I thought about it earlier today and I thought, actually, when you really go deep on this, there are a lot of different things, but they all fall inside of two different categories One is the more traditional way and one is the less traditional way. So if we say traditional and non traditional, so when I'm talking about traditional. I'm talking about performance royalties, mechanical royalties, the things that are collected through a performing rights organization or collection society. So, first off, performance income, right. Let's just just think about copyright for a minute, right, because copyright is the right to copy, isn't it so?
Speaker 1:People that write songs, you know they have the rights over how their songs are used by people, by companies. If a third party uses a song without permission, it's an infringement of copyright, so that they have the rights over how their songs are used by people, by companies. If a third party uses a song without permission, it's an infringement of copyright. So a copyright is really defined by, you know, a creator's kind of decision-making process which led to the composition of the lyrics, the melody, the harmony of a song. A songwriter is often referred to as the first owner of a copyright, and that means that they don't have to work with the music publisher. However, if there are multiple creators of a copyright, that and that means that they don't have to work with the music publisher. However, if there are multiple creators of a song, ownership of that song is split between those different parties and control of copyrights can be assigned to a music publisher, but they don't have to be. But performing rights or performing royalties relate to the use of that song when it's broadcasted or performed live. So that could be anything from films to television to ad campaigns, to live performance at festivals, small venues, anything like that, where the songs are performed or broadcasted. That would be collected by your performing rights organisation.
Speaker 1:Okay, secondly, there are mechanical rights. Now, mechanical rights kind of confuse a lot of people, so let me just simplify what they are. So mechanical rights relate to the reproduction and distribution of songs that are in a to stream it like a tablet or a phone or a laptop, and it is those devices that we have to use in order to stream, and that is why it qualifies as a mechanical royalty, and that is why it qualifies as a mechanical royalty. Now, the rights are not owned by the performers or the artists or the record companies, but by the composers, the songwriters and maybe even sometimes the publishers, as they relate only to the compositional copyright, not the copyright of the sound recording. So this is the song copyright, not the recording copyright. So users of those compositions, such as record labels or streaming services, online stores, must obtain a mechanical license from the rights holders in order to reproduce and distribute the recorded product of those songs. I hope you're still with me. So the mechanical rights have no link to public performance or broadcast of a song. They relate to the units of sales, downloads, streams etc. And the statutory rate for a mechanical royalty fluctuates dramatically, right, but to simplify the understanding you know, we can put it in context.
Speaker 1:So you know, let's say, for example, a songwriter composes a song for an artist in South Korea. The artist is including the song on an album which is being released, for example by a label. The songwriter will receive performance royalties through the designated performing rights organization but will also receive mechanical royalties. Now, the mechanical royalties will relate not only to streams and downloads but also to the actual song being reproduced and distributed in physical formats like cd, dvd. And I mentioned south korea because you know DVDs and CDs are sold by the bucket load there still.
Speaker 1:So now mechanical rights for music compositions are, you know, typically collected by collective management organisations or CMOs, which are also responsible for actually licensing the mechanical rights to users. I mean, in certain countries you get kind of specific organisations that collect and distribute mechanical rights royalties. So, for example, you know, here in the UK the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, or MCPS, collects and distributes mechanical royalties to its members, and its members are, you know, composers, publishers, songwriters. So the MCPS works together with the Perform rights society, which collects on broadcast and performance royalties. Now they both kind of operate under a joint cmo kind of venture which is known as prs for music and that administrates both performance and mechanical rights under the same umbrella organization. But they collect and distribute, as you know, separate entities.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's the sort of traditional stuff just covered there in the first five minutes of the podcast, right? So those are the traditional things the mechanical royalties, performance royalties, all the stuff that we kind of hear about that pro's and collection societies do right now. In order for all that to happen, you know, the songs have to be registered correctly and all that kind of stuff. The admin of the songs, right? So you know, some songwriters don't like to do that sort of stuff and maybe have music publishers work with them instead or whatever. But if the songs aren't registered, none of the first five minutes of this podcast is relevant, because without that there is no way to collect on something. So that's the traditional stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's now move over to the non-traditional stuff that is much more present in today's global kind of remote marketplace. So let's think about places where songwriters also make money, first off the online marketplace, places likeaces, like Soundbetter and Airgigs, and even Fiverr. There's a lot of songwriters that I know now that are making a really, really good living through those kind of platforms. Now, if anybody's not familiar with those platforms, what we're basically talking about is two income streams that are attached to it, right? So one is the traditional stuff, what we just talked about a few minutes ago and the other is the fee-based service that you would have for contributing your songwriting skills to someone else's project. So it could be, for example, a dj or a producer. A musician of some kind kind of has a job online that they would like to hire a songwriter for, so that could be somebody that writes lyrics and also performs those lyrics as a top liner. It could also be someone that can kind of contribute other elements. It could be instrumental aspects, guitar aspects. There's all sorts of different ways that we can kind of use the remote marketplace to work with lots and lots of different music creators not just songwriters, by the way. You know guitar players, musicians, uh, mix engineers, all whole manner of people that you can hire online. But where this particularly sits of interest right now in this podcast is how that serves songwriting. So there are a lot of songwriters that are available on the likes of Soundbeta, fiverr and Airgigs etc. That can be hired.
Speaker 1:Now there's a distinct difference between the fee that you get and the back-end royalties. The back-end royalties would relate to the song and the split of ownership is always negotiable on a platform like that. And second, also, people set their terms for what they want, to how much of a song they want to give away. But secondly, there's the fee you get. Now the fee that you get you traditionally kind of sits with the buyout of the rights of the recording. So, for example, if a, if a top line and songwriter is hired on a platform like that, then the fee that they get covers predominantly the use of their voice after they have composed the top line for that song, so that the producer, musician, whoever it is that's hiring them, can then take what they've done and kind of you know they'd still credit them maybe, but you know they would uh get clearance on the use of their parts in that recording. So that you see how that's separate from the songwriting aspect. It might feel like a top line is going well. This is my performance and this is my song and therefore it's the same thing and they're not. They kind of sit in separate areas of intellectual property. One is the recording and one is the songwriting. The songwriting aspect can still be collected on. You would still get a part of your songwriting share that you can collect on when the recording that you've recorded for is used further down the line. I hope you're still with me, okay, so that's kind of the remote marketplace. Many, many people who write songs are doing very, very well there.
Speaker 1:Okay, now another aspect to think about here is production music. Now, so far on this podcast, we've had a couple of people talk about the roles that they play in production music or library music or stock music or whatever term you're used to. Recently we had Jason Tarver, who's a very successful media composer for production music. He featured in episode 19 and he said something very interesting. He said that probably 90 percent of the projects that he works on include vocals. Now, that is perhaps something which has shifted in recent years and we talked about it in episode 19. If you want to go much deeper into production music, do listen back to that episode with Jason Tarver. He goes into immense detail on this subject. But to summarize it briefly now, in the context that we're referring to, we're talking about the that's used by publishers and libraries to aid visuals.
Speaker 1:It's a separate thing than kind of just releasing music as singles. So you think, if you think about how a songwriter uses their skills, it they're actually the same skill, isn't it? Writing for a production music project and writing for a commercial release? It's the same skill set, but how that looks, as a royalty for example, it differs. It's just a separate income stream for the same skill. So production music, you know. Jason talked about the importance of collaboration. Of course collaboration is absolutely crucial, isn't it, to everything we do here with songwriting. But that is an interesting one, and I think there are a lot of songwriters, especially vocalists and top liners, that perhaps could be more present in the production music marketplace. So there's another thing to think about. Ok, now there are also writing for other artists.
Speaker 1:Now, of course, when it comes to songwriters, there is often the tendency to go right, I'm writing these songs, I've got these songs here for my own artist project, I've got these over here, don't really know what I'm doing with those, um, they don't really fit the project or the projects that I'm working on, but you know, there's kind of something about them. That little pile of songs there, you know and I say pile, it's probably might just be something that's on, you know, on your phone or something that's on like a dropbox or google Drive or a USB stick or whatever it is. Those ideas will be useful to people If they resonate with you and there's something about them that's good. But you don't know where to use them. It doesn't mean that other people won't know where to use them. Now, they might not even be full songs, they might just be little, four bar, eight bar ideas that could potentially be fleshed out and embellished into further ideas.
Speaker 1:Now, this is where writing for artists comes in handy, because those ideas, when collaborating with producers and other songwriters, can then be taken and embellished further when you're around people and collaborating with people and therefore it might be that you go do you know what? We've got this song over here that's really really, really suitable for this lead over here that's coming for this artist or for this label that's looking for songs for this new group over here, and that all came from just a little germ of an idea which you may have had, you know, maybe sat on your phone for a couple of years, kind of, you know, not doing very much. So it's good to kind of just think about how those little ideas that sit around you, it can be used for other things. Of course, writing for your own artist projects is great as well, and I always encourage people, especially in this day and age, to try and just not keep your side projects too far on the side from where you are Right, because there are so many times where you know, if we look back to what Chris Tai was saying in a previous episode on this podcast about how you know his past work became kind of like the calling card for how he got into media composition, for example. So whenever we have side project ideas and we think, right, I've got some songs here, I really want to put this out as a side project, do it, don't think about it, just do it, because that can then act as a calling card. You can always take them down if you want to and license them completely differently in the future, but it it puts you in the shop window as a songwriter and I think that's worth bearing in mind as well.
Speaker 1:Now, what about licensing acapellas? Let's go back to that song, that pile of songs that you don't know what to do with. Now there are many places where you can license your acapellas, and let me just clarify what I mean by that. It might be that the top line of a song let's say you've written a song and it's just piano and vocal let's take away that piano for a minute and let's just look at that vocal that vocal could be very, very, very useful to a lot of people. That can't do, perhaps, what you can do with top lines, with lyrics and with your vocals.
Speaker 1:Now, there are ways to license those acapellas in, I think, more accessible ways than they used to be. So, for example, if we look at two different websites, one which is Vocalio and one which is VocalFi. Now, vocalio is a platform whereby you can take those kind of songs that you're not quite sure what to do with and make them available, either exclusively or non-exclusively, to producers, to music creators, to uh, to djs, for example, so that your top lines can then be used by other people in their projects. Now, in exchange for that, on voclio, you would get a songwriting royalty usually 50, but it's always good to read the T's and C's just in case. And you would also get a micro payment for the use of your actual recorded vocal.
Speaker 1:Now, if we contrast that against VocalPhy, vocal-fi is basically a buyout system for songwriters. So it might be that you've got song song, song, song, song right, let me just get those on Vocal-Fi and you are effectively selling those songs. I don't like that term selling songs because people use it in a kind of wrong context. But on Vocal-Fi that is basically what it is. You are kind of selling the rights to the song as well as the rights to the recording of that song. Now, if you're at peace with that, you can do very well with it, and I know many, many people that write songs that they effectively just immediately sell.
Speaker 1:Um, you know if especially if it's acapellas and stuff, so there's nothing wrong with it lots of people do it. Um, I think it can be difficult. If you kind of feel like quite emotionally attached to a song, that can be very, very difficult. So you know, but I think the more and more songs that people write, they start to distance themselves from the emotional content of a song, perhaps Even if it is meaningful to you, it can be still meaningful to other people, I think. So there is a kind of slight hurdle to get over there for some songwriters, but there are also other things.
Speaker 1:Let's look at something completely different, right? In fact, let's go slightly off a slight different angle from that. Let's imagine you've got that acapella right. That's not the only thing you can do with that. What about if you would chop up some of the phrases of that song and put it into a sample pack instead?
Speaker 1:There are many, many sample pack labels out there that you can look at now and submit sample packs to, and sample packs can be anything that can be royalty free, right? So they're royalty free packs of things that relate to mood or genre or instrument, and one of the most popular forms of sample packs is vocals. So if you've got vocals, and you've got the vocals, the acapellas, and you've got the songs that you've written there, and you can chop those up and place them into packs and then license them for other people, now there's no, there's no royalty collection off that because they're royalty free. So the way that a songwriter would make money is off the license payments that come in when people use it. So you could potentially have a hit record with a hook that you've written and you wouldn't be able to collect on it. That's the downside. But of course, if that does happen, believe me, many, many people will want to buy that sample pack. So you kind of do okay out of it, right?
Speaker 1:Another thing that we're starting to see now are sampled instruments using voices that contain songwriting, and I think this is an area of growth for the future. For example, just being able to have access on a keyboard in front of you through plug-in format, through vst format or whatever, where you've got a kind of sampled instrument of a voice that you can express and I don't just mean vocal chops, I'm talking phrases. So again, it's using like a sample pack, but in a playable instrument. That's an area where I know many software developers are starting to kind of look at how they can work with songwriters too. Now another area I'm just I'm looking ahead here, right. So one of the things that is perhaps ahead of us in later in this decade, and I think certainly next decade, is more kind of ethically sourced data sets for AI use, and I see an area of growth there for songwriters, especially songwriters that can sing, because the use of their songs in ethically sourced data sets for AI use will become more prevalent because, as copyright clampdown comes into play on AI in the next few years and rightly so, by the way, because so many AI are just using copywritten material to use for machine language models right to kind of spit out new ideas so eventually that will clean itself up. In English that means that I see a marketplace gap for songwriters that can sing, because there will be a need for cleared data sets of songs with vocals now. I think that's going to be an emerging income stream for songwriters in the years to come.
Speaker 1:Okay, now there's a lot of things to think about there. We've looked at the traditional, we've looked at the sort of non-traditional stuff. But remember here that collaboration is absolutely key. It is entirely possible to kind of be on your own and do a lot of the things that I'm talking about here, especially in the growth of remote technology and, you know, being able to do things on our own. But I think the greatest results they often yielded in music creation, and in songwriting especially, is when we work with other people. Now that could be other people in the room, it could be other people that we work with on a remote level, but collaboration is absolutely key, not only on a creative level, but on a kind of networking level. You know, when you start to work with different people, it opens doors in different places, so it's always, always good to think that.
Speaker 1:Another thing to think about here is this I think there are advantages to two types of songwriters those that can produce and those that can sing. If you're a songwriter that doesn't produce and doesn't sing, it's not impossible to make money from songwriting. Of course not, but it is harder. Course not, but it is harder. So I think if you're a vocalist and you can represent your songwriting as a vocalist, there are lots of ways that you can generate income as a songwriter, as a songwriting producer. That is also true in a slightly different way, but if we think about this, if we go back to the traditional mechanisms for collection that I mentioned earlier in today's podcast, ie performance income and mechanical income there are other aspects to songwriting producers and songwriting vocalists which are interesting, because if their work is used on recordings, there are automatically more income streams available to them.
Speaker 1:If you're a songwriter and your performances are not being used, there is less to collect when it comes to other rights areas. So that is something to think about. Being a songwriting producer, being a songwriting vocalist I think those are two kind of routes which have more areas of collectible income and now and also going forward anyway. So there's a kind of little overview, right of kind, of how songwriters make money. I'm sure these things will evolve in due course they always do but for now, you know, in the mid 2020s, that's a kind of glancing overshot of how that looks right now. I hope that's been useful and I will see you next time. Thank you for being here and may the force be with you. Christmas party, the music Christmas party.
