Publishers and the Nuances of Publishing in the Music Industry

MCAI - 29 Aug 2018

In the last decade or so, we have been fortunate enough to witness a steady rise in the number of aspiring indie musicians, especially because of the wide range of social/digital media platforms that have sprouted up. This era of the World Wide Web has provided all emerging artists to have an easily accessible stage of sorts for exhibiting their talent with an unprecedented simplicity.

However, more often than not, the artists seem to overlook one of the most important aspects of monetizing and protecting their work and what it entails: publishing. With the immense ease of access and exposure that the digital age has sent our way come a bunch of complications that every artist should be aware of. Publishing or putting up one’s work on any platform is just the beginning and what comes after can be quite tedious. A license needs to be obtained for any intellectual property that has been published. There needs to be sufficient protection provided to the creations, not to mention the array of complexities dealing with assigning third-party rights and royalties that ought to be taken care of.

Publishing can be handled by the author of the piece themselves, but more often than not are handled by a third party company. Most artists that want to stay independent of record labels, publishing companies etc. tend to publish their own music, but this is somewhat of a rarity. To avoid the hassle of dealing with handling copyright violations and royalty collection themselves many artists sign on with publishing companies. While publishing companies and record labels have similar goals, they’re not one and the same. The role of a publishing company is more administration-oriented.

Music Composers’ Association of India (MCAI) is one such organization in India that works towards the same, supporting music artists all across the country and familiarizing them with the finer nuances of our national copyright laws. Not only does MCAI lend a hand in the registration process but it also comes to the artists’ aid to seek justice in case of any wrongdoings regarding their intellectual property. Founded and run by a team of pioneers from the Indian music industry, MCAI is a one-of-its-kind society that caters to musicians across all spectrums and is especially beneficial to the beginners who may find the whole process of getting copyrights for one’s work a tad bit tiresome or confusing.

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