TAXI.com

Hello,
I'm a singer/songwriter, prepping a big independent recording project for the summer. I've read some about publishing companies. It seems like I would have more a higher percentage of my songs if I had my own publishing company, but an established company could likely place more songs.

My plans for my songs are to tour my project and submit songs to Taxi. Which publishing route is best or necessary?

Any advice?

I'll let others with more experience give you the real advice, but my two cents is that Established Publishing is the better route. I think everyone, at first, thinks "Hey, I'm writing all this material, I should just become I publishing company or a library. I certainly did.

But I think the reality is, publishing companies have staff's of people who are working full time working their connections (which aren't easy to come by) trying to sell your music to the real buyers. That is a full time job which leaves little time to write more music. Now if you already have all those connections and the time to work them on a daily basis, then maybe you should. I didn't.

hth's
B

Well the plural of staff is staves, but other than that, I think Bryan has the right of it. There are situations that might call for establishing your own publishing company; if you're already your own label, it couldn't hurt, in case you should accidentally become a YouTube sensation and appear on Ellen, or if your future brother in law is head of Dreamworks and has promised your song will run under the end title of a B picture as a wedding present...if you're doing interstitials for a children's audiobook, basically any great paying gigs you might get without a publisher's help, it could be beneficial, but it may be more important to focus on writing and performing really great songs so as to attract a major player, if this is your first recording project.

You should read Ariel Hyatt's book. She highly recommends getting an intern to hand the record label type work that all songwriters encounter. The US Copyright law recognizes the songwriter as the publisher if there is no specific publisher named.

If you are promoting and posting your music on the internet you are the publisher.

In the music biz world each song is a pie. you can be a publisher and keep a bigger slice of the pie and you can at the same time give a slice to an active 'bigger' publisher who will work to get your stuff used. The pie can be broken down to little slivers ,if you want...