Insights

Entertainment & Media

Entertainment and media insights on publishing, recording, sync licensing, management, and rights.

Chain of Title in Music: How to Verify Who Owns What Before Any Money Changes Hands

Every license, every acquisition, every sync placement, and every royalty payment depends on one foundational question: who owns the rights? If the answer is wrong, incomplete, or undocumented, the deal can collapse, the royalties can freeze, and the parties can spend more on litigation than the catalog is worth.

Management Agreements: What Managers Earn, What They Control, and How the Relationship Ends

A manager advises and counsels the artist across every aspect of the artist's career in the entertainment industry. The manager negotiates deals, coordinates the professional team (booking agents, attorneys, accountants, publicists), develops strategy, manages day-to-day business decisions, and serves as the primary point of contact between the artist and every third party that wants the artist's time, talent, or money.

Music Publishing Agreements: What Songwriters Assign, What They Keep, and How the Money Splits

Every dollar a song earns is split between two shares. The writer's share (50 percent of total income) belongs to the songwriter. The publisher's share (the other 50 percent) belongs to whoever controls the publishing rights. A publishing agreement determines who owns or administers that publisher's share, how much of it the songwriter keeps, and what the publisher does in exchange.

Producer Agreements: Points, Credits, Letters of Direction, and the Business Behind the Board

A producer's contribution to a recording can range from delivering a pre-made instrumental track to shaping every element of the final master, from arrangement and instrumentation through vocal production and mixing. What the producer receives in return depends on the agreement.

Recording and Distribution Agreements: Labels, Distributors, and How Revenue Reaches the Artist

A recording agreement is the contract that determines who owns the master recordings, who funds the marketing and distribution, how revenue is split, and how long the relationship lasts. It's the most consequential document a recording artist will sign, and the terms the artist accepts at signing govern the economics of every recording delivered under the deal for years or decades after the ink dries.

Synchronization Licensing: Placing Music in Film, Television, Advertising, and Video Games

Synchronization licensing is the process of pairing music with visual media. Every time a song plays during a television scene, a film sequence, a commercial, a video game, or a trailer, someone negotiated a sync license to make that happen.