I've found it helpful for students of my music business classes to think of their music careers in terms of holding multiple jobs, instead of one gigantic, passionate dream. This helps to strategize and plan in more realistic, goal-oriented ways.
A fundamental understanding of how money is generated by recorded music, and what kind of companies do the work of mining that money, can help give some focus and direction for setting goals. In my last post, I talked about two important copyrights that generate money for their owners. Here's a quick review.
Songs - owned by the songwriter and/or their publisher. Copyright law protects authors, and songwriters are authors of music and lyrics. Once a songwriter "fixes the song in a tangible medium" (writes it down or records it), it is then protected as a work of authorship. Only the song owner can record, distribute, broadcast, play, etc... the song unless they sell someone else one of those permissions. The 3 main permissions songwriters and publishers sell are Mechanical Licenses, Performance Licenses, and Synch Licenses (broken down further in my previous post).
Master Recording - owned by whoever pays to make the recording. Known as Sound Recording Copyrights, this copyright protection is given by law to owners of recordings, and only the owner can sell, distribute, broadcast digitally, etc... the recording unless they sell someone else one of those permissions. Permission to use a master recording is called a Master Use License (super creative).
Publishing companies take up the duties involved in selling licenses on behalf of songwriters, collecting the money for them, and administrative type duties involved in protecting and registering the song copyrights.
Record Labels buy mechanical licenses from songwriters and publishing companies and pay to make master recordings of those songs with their artists. Then they market and distribute those recordings, with hopes that they sell enough to make back the money it took to pay for the recording (and then some).
Independent artists need to take up the duties that an artist with a publishing deal and a record deal would have done on their behalf. Thinking of yourself as not just an indie artist, but instead as a songwriter (song copyright owner), artist (performer), publishing company (song permissions seller and money collector), and record label (funding recordings and selling those recordings) can help break down the money generating paths and help set more specific career goals.
In further posts, I will flesh out the details of these income streams further. If you have any music business questions, feel free to go to the "Contact" page of the site and send me a message...I'd love to help.
Ty