I recently recieved an email from a songwriter who had been offered a “contract” with a publisher. Part of that contract required her to pay for a re-recording of her song.<\/p>\n
If a so-called publisher wants you to give them money for ANYTHING, run the other way! This is not standard practise. A publisher who is interested in your song will send you a single song contract that will give them permission to take your song and pitch it to artists or bands for a period of time. There should be a reversion clause that essentially gives you all of the rights back after a period of time if the song has not been successfully signed to anyone. And that’s it!<\/p>\n
There are people out there who want to take advantage of newer songwriters who don’t know any better. Songwriters are flattered when they get a contract of any kind, and often don’t know how it’s supposed to work, so they’ll go ahead and pay for the “re-recording” thinking that this gives them a better chance to have the song picked up. It’s all baloney.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Arm yourself with knowledge! Before embarking on any business venture, you’d want to learn about that buisness, right? Well, song publishing is a business and you also need to know how it works before you embark on contacting publishers with your songs.<\/p>\n
If you want to learn more about publishing and how it works, I have an article called “Publishing: A Brief Beginner’s Guide”<\/a> that’ll give you a little bit of an idea.\u00a0 You might also consider picking up a copy of Songwriter’s Market…you can buy it online through Amazon through my store (or click here: IJ’s Songwriting Store<\/a>).\u00a0 Songwriter’s Market is not only filled with publishers looking for songs, but there are a lot of educational articles that are worth reading.<\/p>\n The general rule of thumb is that if anyone asks you for money, they are not legitimate.\u00a0 Also, if you can afford to, have a contract read by an entertainment lawyer so you know for sure what you’re getting yourself into.<\/p>\n IJ<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently recieved an email from a songwriter who had been offered a “contract” with a publisher. Part of that contract required her to pay for a re-recording of her song. If a so-called publisher wants you to give them money for ANYTHING, run the other way! This is not standard practise. A publisher who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prwoq-dn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irenejackson.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}