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Producers Score With Music Rights The sound of royalties. Why giving up the music score may cost you. Your new adventure/teen angst/sci-fi blockbuster has finally made it through principal photography. You’ve got the fine cut in hand and you are ready to hire a composer to cap off a great movie with a fantastic music score. You find a talented (and economical) composer. The composer requests the right to retain all of the publishing rights in the score, to which you agree. After all, you are a film producer, not a music publisher. However, you may be giving up a valuable source of ongoing revenue for your company. Royalties received from performing right societies (like SOCAN in Canada or ASCAP and BMI in the US) can constitute a large and ongoing source of income for film composers and music publishers. License fees collected by these societies can be very substantial for films that receive wide-spread international distribution (both from theatrical and television distribution). Although U.S. theatres are not licensed by ASCAP or BMI, international exhibition of films gives rise to royalties. (Even a domestic box office failure can generate over $100,000 in foreign performance royalties!) If the film is shown on U.S. television, a further ongoing source of royalty income is possible, which may continue throughout the life of the copyright in the music if the film is still shown. Further, if a film’s score is of such quality that a soundtrack including the score is released, another source of income will be derived from the mechanical royalties paid to music publishers by record companies to produce the soundtrack CD for release. When a producer commissions a composer to write the score for a film, a number of factors will influence the fee that will be paid to the composer. These include the film’s overall budget; the film’s total music budget; the desired amount of background music; the number of musicians required (which in some cases may be just the composer and his or her sequencing software); whether the film is produced by a major company intending on wide-scale distribution or whether the producer is an independent producer planning a limited theatrical release; the composer’s past film credits and successes (or failures!); and finally, whether the composer retains the “publisher’s share” of royalty income for his or her own publishing company. In many cases, the score created for a film will be made as a “work made in the course of employment” for the producer who will be considered the original owner of the music, holding the worldwide copyright in the score for the entire term of copyright protection. In that case, although the composer will receive half of the performance royalties (the “songwriter’s share”) directly from SOCAN, the producer will receive the other half (the “publisher’s share”), providing an ongoing source of income. If,
however, a film’s budget does not permit a composer fee high
enough to attract a quality composer to the project, depending on
other factors at hand and the relative negotiating power of the
parties, a composer may be willing to accept a much lower composing
fee in exchange for the right to retain 100% of the royalty income.
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