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Contest Publisher’s Guide

Background

Music rights are confusing. There are different kinds of rights, and different organizations managing those rights for performing (ASCAP and BMI), recording (Harry Fox, “mechanical rights”), sheet music publishing, using music in video, and so on. The companies that own the rights are called publishers, not to be confused with sheet music publishers.

For popular sheet music publishing, there are two big companies: Hal Leonard Corporation and Warner Brothers Publishing. Contemporary A Cappella Publishing is exclusively distributed by Hal Leonard. Hal Leonard in turn has paid the owners of perhaps 40% of all popular music (the publishers) an advance against royalties, for the exclusive right to publish sheet music versions of the songs controlled by those publishers.

Our Deal

CAP, in turn, sub-licenses these songs through Hal Leonard Corporation, and we pay 12.5% of suggested retail for the use of these songs. However, Hal Leonard only controls the sheet music rights to somewhere under half of all popular songs. Songs controlled by Warner Brothers are not licensable, and songs not controlled by either of these are big question marks.

This means that we are looking for arrangements of songs in the Hal Leonard “family” of controlled songs. Unfortunately, there is no published list of these songs. Our process is: we submit songs to our contact at Hal Leonard Corp., and they tell us whether or not they have the rights to those songs (which usually, but not always, means we can publish an arrangement of the song).

We’ve learned from lots of song submissions that some publishers (owners of songs) seem to be 100% o.k., others are controlled by Warner Brothers (and are therefore off limits), but a bunch we’re just not sure of until we ask.

Specific Publisher Guidelines

If you have a song that you want to submit to the arranging contest, here is a suggested course of action to see if CAP would be able to publish it.

  1. Visit ASCAP’s web site, www.ascap.com/ace/search.cfm?mode=search. Search for the song you want to submit. If you find a match, make sure the songwriter information and performer information listed on the web site is consistent with what you know about the song. If you don’t find a match, visit BMI’s web site, www.bmi.com/search and do the same thing. If neither works, try searching on the songwriter’s name (if you have it). If you’re still coming up dry, try www.allmusic.com to come up with songwriters, then try ASCAP and BMI again.
  2. Once you’ve found the song online, copy down the publishers' information.
  3. It’s not publishable if one or more of the following publishers is listed: Warner Music, Warner Chappell, Music Sales, Universal Polygram, Interior Music, Disney, Paul Simon Music, or Zomba Enterprises.
  4. It probably is publishable if it’s one of the following publishers: Beechwood Music, EMI April Music, EMI Blackwood Music, EMI Longitude Music, Famous Music, Fort Knox Music, Irving Music, Jobete Music, Screen Gems-EMI Music, Sony/ATV Tunes LLC, Trio Music
  5. Still not sure? Go to www.halleonard.com and search for the original artist or the song. If you find either, chances are the song will be publishable.