Answers/Splits and ownership/What Is a Co-Publishing Deal, and What Do You Actually Keep?

Splits and ownership

What Is a Co-Publishing Deal, and What Do You Actually Keep?

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 4, 2026·Splits and ownership

A co-publishing deal is the point where the paperwork stops being about collection and starts being about ownership. Everything else I write about on this site — administrators, PRO accounts, The MLC — is somebody helping you collect money on songs you still entirely own. A co-pub deal is different in kind. You give away half the copyright.

So let me be direct about two things before anything else.

The arithmetic: you keep 75% of the income and 50% of the copyright, in the standard structure. Not 50% of the money, which is what "50/50 co-pub" makes people assume, and not 100% of anything.

The framing: I am an independent artist who has never signed one of these. I can explain the structure and the arithmetic clearly because the structure is public and the arithmetic is arithmetic. I cannot evaluate your contract, and neither can any article. This is the specific document where a music lawyer stops being a nice-to-have. US law and US practice throughout.

How does composition income divide before any deal exists?

Every composition already splits in two, and this is the fact the rest of the page hangs on.

Songtrust states it plainly: performance royalties "have always been split this way, with one half being sent to the songwriters directly (writer share) and the other half collected by a publisher (publisher share)." As the creator you inherently own both halves. If you have no publisher, the publisher's half is still yours — it just needs a registered claimant, which is why a self-published writer opens a publisher account at their PRO.

So the starting position for a songwriter with no deal is:

That 100% is the number every deal on this page is measured against.

What does a co-publishing deal actually change?

You assign half of the publisher's share — 25 percentage points of income — to a publishing company, and with it half of the publishing copyright in the covered works. In return you typically receive an advance and the publisher's registration, administration, collection and pitching services.

Here is the same table with the common deal types added.

Administration row uses Songtrust's published rates — 15% of performance royalties and 20% of non-performance royalties, effective January 1 2025, plus a $100 one-time registration per writer. Commission is charged on the publisher's share it collects.

Read the two right-hand columns together, because that pairing is the deal. A co-pub gives up 25 points of income and 50% of the copyright, and gets capital and a company back.

Why is "50/50" misleading about what you actually end up with?

Because the phrase is doing two jobs badly.

It describes ownership, not income. "We'll co-publish 50/50" means the publisher takes half the publishing copyright. It does not mean you take half the money. Your income share is 75%, because your writer's half was never on the table. Someone hearing "50/50" and picturing half their royalties is understating what they get.

But it also describes a state you have not reached yet. The 75% is your share of income in the abstract. Until the advance is recouped, your realised income from the deal is the advance and nothing else. Someone hearing "75%" and picturing a quarterly cheque is overstating what they get, often for years.

Those two errors point in opposite directions, which is exactly why the shorthand is useless and why you have to look at the actual numbers on the actual paper.

There is a third thing the phrase hides: who administers. In most co-pub deals the publisher administers 100% of the composition, including your writer's share, meaning all the money flows through the publisher's accounting before any of it reaches you. Some deals also take an administration fee off the top before the shares are calculated. The percentage is negotiated deal by deal and is not published anywhere I can verify, so I will not put a number on it — but you must find out whether your deal has one, because a fee off the top changes every figure in the table above.

What is an advance, and what does recoupment mean in practice?

An advance is not payment for your songs. It is a prepayment of royalties you have not yet earned, and it comes back out of your own share.

Work it through with round numbers. Say a publisher advances $50,000 against a catalog in a 75/25 co-pub, and the covered songs go on to generate $100,000 of gross publishing income over the term.

Illustrative arithmetic on a standard 75/25 structure. Actual deals add administration fees, cross-collateralisation and territory-specific handling that change these figures.

Now run the same deal where the songs earn $40,000 instead. Your 75% is $30,000. That is less than the $50,000 advance, so you are unrecouped by $20,000. You receive no further royalties. In most publishing deals the advance is recoupable but not repayable, so you do not owe that $20,000 back as a debt — but "most" is not "all", and this is one of the clauses to have a lawyer point at in your specific contract. Meanwhile the publisher keeps its $10,000 and still owns half the copyright.

Two more mechanisms that decide how this feels in real life:

• Cross-collateralisation. If the deal pools multiple albums, options or agreements into one recoupment account, a successful record's earnings pay off an unsuccessful one's advance before you see anything. Ask explicitly what is cross-collateralised with what.
• What counts toward recoupment. Whether sync fees, settlement money, and foreign income all flow into the same balance at full value is a drafting question, not a law of nature.

The plain-English summary of recoupment: you are spending your own future money, early, and paying for the privilege with a quarter of your income and half your copyright. That can be a completely rational trade if you need capital now. It is a terrible trade if you took it because it felt like being signed.

What does the publisher actually give you in return?

Worth listing honestly, because it is more than collection:

• Global registration and collection, including the foreign territories a US writer cannot reach alone.
• Active sync pitching. Not the non-exclusive "we'll clear it if someone asks" that most administrators offer, but a person whose job is placing your catalog.
• Co-writing and room access, which for professional songwriters is frequently the actual product.
• Capital, which is the honest headline. An advance is money you can use now to make records, tour, or stop working a day job.
• Catalog management — chasing unmatched money, fixing bad registrations, enforcing against infringement.

If what you want from this list is only the first item, you are looking at the wrong instrument. Collection is available for a commission and no ownership from a publishing administrator, and much of the US portion of it is available free from The MLC and a PRO publisher account. My own six years of paid administration collected $261.39 and paid me $222.76 — against a $100 fee, no advance, no ownership transferred, cancellable.

Can you ever get the copyright back?

There is a statutory route in US law, and you should know it exists even though it is slow.

Under 17 U.S.C. § 203, an author who granted a transfer or licence of copyright on or after January 1, 1978 — other than in a work made for hire — may terminate that grant. The termination may be effected "at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant"; if the grant covers the right of publication, the window instead begins 35 years from publication under the grant or 40 years from execution, whichever ends earlier. Advance written notice must be served not less than two or more than ten years before the effective date, and a copy must be recorded with the Copyright Office before that date as a condition of it taking effect. Section 203 also states that termination may be effected "notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary."

Two practical readings of that.

It is a real right and it cannot be contracted away. That is genuinely protective, and it is why deals are often described as running "life of copyright" with an asterisk.

Thirty-five years is a long time. Section 203 is not a way out of a deal you regret in year three. Everything short of the statutory window is governed by whatever reversion, term, option and default clauses your contract contains — which is, again, why a lawyer reads the contract.

Related: § 204 requires that a transfer of copyright ownership be made in a signed written instrument. A co-publishing deal is by definition such a transfer. If somebody is talking about co-publishing your catalog without paper, that is not a deal, it is a conversation.

What should an independent artist understand before signing one?

A short list of the questions I would want answered in writing, in plain language, before I signed anything:

1. What exactly is covered? Named existing songs, or everything you write during the term? Future works clauses are where writers give away far more than they thought.
2. How long is the term, and how does it end? A fixed number of years, an album cycle with options, or life of copyright? Is there any reversion if the deal underperforms?
3. What is the income split, in numbers, and is there an administration fee off the top?
4. What is the advance, and what is it recoupable against? One deal, or cross-collateralised with everything?
5. Who administers the writer's share? If the publisher does, all your money flows through their accounting.
6. What are the audit rights? How often can you audit, at whose cost, and how long do you have to object to a statement?
7. What happens on assignment? If the publisher sells its catalog, and they do sell catalogs, your deal goes with it. Who could you end up working with?
8. What is the sync approval process? Can they license your song into contexts you would refuse?

If you cannot get straight answers to those eight in writing, that is itself the answer.

And the ordering point that matters most for readers of this site: almost nobody at independent scale should be considering this at all. A co-publishing deal is what happens when a publisher believes your catalog will generate enough future income to justify writing you a cheque against it. If that is not currently true, the correct sequence is free registrations, then a distributor, then a paid administrator if your foreign audience justifies it — and the ownership stays entirely yours the whole way.

I am an independent artist explaining a contract structure and the arithmetic inside it. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and nothing here is a substitute for having a music attorney read your actual agreement before you sign it. Deal terms vary enormously and the numbers in my worked example are illustrations, not market rates.