Answers/Splits and ownership/What Is Sub-Publishing in Music, and Do You Need It?

Splits and ownership

What Is Sub-Publishing in Music, and Do You Need It?

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

Almost every article about sub-publishing tells you to "expand globally" and stops there. I want to do something more useful: define the thing precisely, show you the chain the money travels down, and then show you exactly how much foreign publishing money one small independent catalog actually produced over six years. The number is small. It is also real, and it is the honest answer to whether any of this matters at your scale.

A sub-publisher is a company engaged by a rights holder to license and administer its works in a specific territory. That is Songtrust's own glossary definition, and its example is the clearest one: an American publisher engages a sub-publisher in Germany to handle its affairs in Germany. One country, one local company, one set of local relationships.

US artist framing throughout.

Why does foreign money need a local company at all?

Because collection societies are national, and national societies pay national registrations.

When somebody in Germany streams your song, a German rights body sees a usage. It looks that usage up in its own database. It pays whoever is registered there as the claimant for that composition. If nobody is registered there, the money does not fly to Hawaii on its own — it sits, and after a period it typically gets distributed to the society's own members by market share, which means it ends up in somebody else's pocket.

Reciprocal agreements between societies move some of this across borders automatically, particularly on the performance side. That is why a US writer at ASCAP or BMI does eventually see some foreign performance royalties without doing anything. But reciprocity is not the same as registration. Reciprocity moves matched money. It does not do the matching, and it does the least well on mechanicals, which in the streaming era is where most of the composition money lives.

That is the whole reason the sub-publishing layer exists. Somebody has to be present, registered and matchable inside each territory.

How does the sub-publishing chain actually work?

Here is the path a single foreign stream's composition money travels.

Two things follow from that table, and both of them show up in real statements.

The money is commissioned twice. The local company takes a cut before it remits, and your own publisher or administrator takes a cut when it arrives. Sub-publishing rates are negotiated privately between companies and are not published, so I am not going to invent a percentage. But the structure guarantees that a foreign dollar reaches you smaller than a domestic one.

The money is slow. Six handoffs, each on its own reporting calendar. In my own export the median gap between the month a song was streamed and the payment covering it was about 290 days, and a quarter of the lines took over 2.7 years. The foreign lines are disproportionately the slow ones.

What does a sub-publisher actually do inside its territory?

More than forward mail. A real sub-publishing appointment covers:

• Registration. Filing the works with the local performing rights society and the local mechanical body, with correct splits, correct writer identifiers and a work code the society can match against.
• Collection. Being the claimant of record so the society has somebody to pay.
• Local licensing. Issuing mechanical licences and clearing local sync requests — an advert in that country, a local TV show, a local compilation.
• Claiming and dispute work. Chasing unmatched usage, correcting mis-registered works, and handling conflicts with other claimants.
• Local promotion, sometimes. Traditional sub-publishing deals often included active plugging in the territory. That part is largely absent from the administrator-network version most independents actually use.

The last two lines are the ones that separate a genuine sub-publishing relationship from a pipe. A pipe collects what arrives. A sub-publisher goes and finds what has not arrived.

Is a publishing administrator a sub-publisher?

No, and the difference is worth getting right because the words are used loosely.

Songtrust's help centre answers this in one line: "No — Songtrust is a publishing administrator." If you have a previously established publishing entity, it is listed as administering on behalf of your business. If you do not, it acts as your publisher and is listed as such on your registrations.

So an administrator sits where the publisher sits in that chain, not where the sub-publisher sits. It reaches foreign territories through its own network of society relationships and partners. From your side of the transaction the effect looks similar — foreign money starts arriving — but you have not appointed anybody in Germany. You have hired one company that already has a way in.

That middle column is what most artists asking about sub-publishing are actually shopping for.

What did foreign collection actually produce for me?

This is the part I can put numbers on, because I have six years of statements from a paid administrator on a 73-song catalog.

Across payment periods from late 2023 through early 2026, covering usage back to June 2019, Songtrust collected $261.39 and paid me $222.76 after commission. Here is where it came from:

Top six mechanical-streaming sources from my complete Songtrust export. Percentages are my arithmetic against the $261.39 total. Performance royalties across all sources totalled $10.03 gross — under 4% of everything.

APRA/AMCOS at $22.60 was my single biggest non-US collector, ahead of anything European, which I did not expect from a Hawaii reggae and hip-hop catalog until I looked at where the streams were coming from.

Now the honest reading of that table. $189.12 of it came through The MLC, which is free, US-only, and available to any US writer by direct registration. Almost three-quarters of what my paid administrator collected is money a free registration would have collected for me.

Which means the actual product I bought — the thing nothing free could have delivered — is the foreign slice. And the foreign slice, over six years, on 73 songs, is measured in tens of dollars.

I am not telling you that to be discouraging. I am telling you because "expand globally" is advice with no magnitude attached, and magnitude is the whole decision. Twenty-two dollars and sixty cents is what the global expansion of a small independent catalog looks like on the composition side. If your catalog is ten times mine, it is a couple of hundred dollars. If your catalog is the size of a career, it is real money and this entire infrastructure is why publishers exist.

Does a small independent artist need sub-publishing?

Directly? No. Sub-publishing deals are negotiated between publishing companies. Nobody in Germany wants a territory-specific agreement with one writer holding a few dozen songs, and you would not want the administrative burden of managing a dozen such relationships even if they did.

What you might need is the foreign collection that sub-publishing exists to produce — and for an independent, the route to that is an administrator's network, not your own appointments.

Here is the decision, in the order I would actually make it:

1. Check where your listeners are before you buy anything. Open your distributor's country report. My whole catalog spans 178 countries, which sounds impressive and mostly is not — long tails of a handful of streams each generate nothing collectible. What matters is whether any single foreign territory holds a real share of your plays.
2. Do the free US registrations first. The MLC for US digital mechanicals. Writer affiliation at ASCAP or BMI, free at both, plus a publisher account so the publisher half of performance money has a claimant. SoundExchange for the recording side of non-interactive radio. This is roughly ninety minutes of work and it captured 72% of everything my paid administrator ever collected.
3. Only then buy foreign collection, in the form of a publishing administrator, and buy it with your eyes open about what you are purchasing. You are not purchasing a bigger US number. You are purchasing access to societies you cannot register with yourself.
4. Never double-register. One claimant per work. If your administrator is registering your catalog, do not also file your own MLC claim underneath it — conflicting claims freeze payment until somebody untangles them, and that somebody is you.

What I would tell someone searching "sub publishing music"

You almost certainly do not need a sub-publisher. You need to know that foreign composition money is real, that it is structurally invisible from a US dashboard, that nothing free reaches it, and that the standard way an independent artist reaches it is one administrator rather than a network of territorial deals.

And you need a sense of scale before you spend anything. Mine is on this page: $22.60 from Australia and New Zealand over six years, out of $261.39 total, on 73 songs. Check your own country report against that. If your foreign share is meaningfully bigger than mine, the maths tips. If it is not, do the free registrations and come back to this decision when your audience has changed shape.

I am an independent artist reporting my own catalog's statements and describing how the international collection chain is structured — not a lawyer, and not an accountant. Sub-publishing terms are privately negotiated and vary; administrator rates and coverage change. Verify current terms directly with any company before signing, and have a lawyer read anything that transfers rights rather than administration.