Exploiting Music Publishing Copyrights
Music Publishing Essay Over the past fifty years, the British Music Publishing industry has undergone dramatic changes. It has evolved as an entity with innovations in technology, changes and creations of laws and new mediums to promote and exploit songs to a wider audience. Therefore, the way in which the music publishing industry operates and exploits its assets has completely transformed, and continues to do so at a rapid pace. This paper will attempt to explore the ways in which publishers exploit song copyrights and the way in which this has changed over the past 60 years. It is important to define what is meant by copyright and its role within the industry. The Performing Right Society website states: “Copyright protect original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works. It allows an original work to be considered a property that is owned by somebody. When a song or piece of music is written, the person who wrote it owns the copyright and therefore has the right to decide how and when it should be played.”
The main outlets for administering and exploiting music copyrights in the United Kingdom are major music publishers, independent music publishers and self-publishing (Dodgson, 2008). The primary method of exploiting song copyrights utilised by Music Publishers is the licensing of songs the publisher controls to be recorded, produced and sold. Copyright enforcement is in the form of a license (permit of use) that must be acquired for song usage. The law states that the owner of a song copyright is to be paid whenever a composition is mechanically reproduced (Wikströmm, 2009). This generates royalties that are collected by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), which acts as an agent on behalf of the music publisher to administer the right to reproduce the specific song and to collect the royalties.
The format on which songs have been featured has diversified radically. Until the revolutionary creation of digital
The main outlets for administering and exploiting music copyrights in the United Kingdom are major music publishers, independent music publishers and self-publishing (Dodgson, 2008). The primary method of exploiting song copyrights utilised by Music Publishers is the licensing of songs the publisher controls to be recorded, produced and sold. Copyright enforcement is in the form of a license (permit of use) that must be acquired for song usage. The law states that the owner of a song copyright is to be paid whenever a composition is mechanically reproduced (Wikströmm, 2009). This generates royalties that are collected by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), which acts as an agent on behalf of the music publisher to administer the right to reproduce the specific song and to collect the royalties.
The format on which songs have been featured has diversified radically. Until the revolutionary creation of digital
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