By Makenna Van Liew,
When a song goes viral, it can feel effortless. All of a sudden, it’s everywhere: Your friend’s Instagram story. In line at the coffee shop. The closing credits of your favorite show. We live in a world where technology exposes us to music at our fingertips, our ears, on our screens, and as a soundtrack to almost any public place.
The constant pulse music provides in our daily lives feels so commonplace that we forget how much actual work goes into getting it to the point of being ready to listen to. But, behind every hit song is a web of work that most people never see. Co-writers, producers, managers, publishers, distributors, and other collaborators help shape, release, and protect songs along the way.
At its core, publishing administration ensures that songwriters and contributors receive both the recognition they deserve and the compensation their art generates.
As a song moves through the world, every use has to be accounted for. Collecting publishing royalties means making sure those uses are identified, registered, and paid back to the songwriters who made them possible.
Explaining the journey a song undergoes to become payable is next to impossible. When you work with songwriters and artists directly, it’s your daily job to pull back the curtain, approach with patience and empathy, and ensure they can digest the complexities of this part of the industry so that they can focus on what they do best — create.
One common misconception is that a song can be collected before ownership is defined. Documenting who wrote what should happen the moment a song comes to life. If you put that off and then you can’t agree, songs either get stuck in conflict or are just never registered in the first place, and a paycheck will never materialize. Royalties sit in an unallocated black box of unclaimed funds that eventually get redistributed to the broader market instead of the people who were in the room when it was written. These kinds of ownership disputes frequently strain even the most successful groups. From the friction within The Eagles during the writing of “Victim of Love” to the legal fallout of uncleared samples, failing to establish clear rights can fracture both professional relationships and creative legacies.
Beyond splits, it’s important to know what your contract says before you sign it. Long term, a lot of the money from a song can come from the composition side, if you keep your publishing rights. Streaming mechanical rates are micro-pennies per play, but they compound. So that can generate meaningful money for years if you’ve kept your rights.
Writers also have to think carefully about advances. That upfront money can feel like a lifeline, and a lot of the time it is. But it is never just free money. It usually comes with tradeoffs around rights, ownership, and future earnings, which is why it’s so important to understand the full deal before signing. Copyright ownership is easy to give away and very hard to get back.
The good news is that publishing deals come in all shapes, and the right structure really depends on where a songwriter is in their career and what they’re trying to build. Over the last decade, we’ve increasingly seen that artists who keep their publishing rights, who register their work properly and stay on top of where it’s being used, are building catalogs that generate income on their own terms. They don’t have to give up creative control to get paid. Publishing administration and Songtrust exist to make that path more accessible.
This is why getting it right matters. Behind every song, there is a cohort of contributors who deserve credit. But credit, ownership, and payment don’t happen automatically. They depend on lots of invisible work being done right. And songwriters deserve the tools and support to protect what they created from the start.
- Makenna Van Liew is Director, Client Accounts and Services at Songtrust.