What Is a 360 Deal? The Publishing Clause Nobody Reads

A 360 deal is a recording contract in which the company takes a percentage of revenue streams beyond the records: touring, merchandise, endorsements, brand deals, and in most versions your publishing. The name comes from the company participating in every direction you earn rather than only in record sales.

The touring percentage is what people argue about in the meeting. The publishing clause is the one that outlives everybody in the room. A tour ends in November. A composition earns for the writer's life plus 70 years, so a share of it signed away at 24 is still being paid out when the songs are older than the label that signed them.

What a 360 deal actually covers

There is no standard 360 deal, which is the first thing to understand. The phrase describes a shape, not a template. What the shape usually contains:

• Recorded music. The traditional core, with an advance, recording funds and a royalty rate.
• Live performance. A percentage of touring income, sometimes of gross, sometimes of net after costs. The difference between those two words is larger than the percentage.
• Merchandise. Often split by channel, so at-venue sales are treated differently from your own online store.
• Endorsements and brand deals. A cut of sponsorship income.
• Publishing. Either a percentage of your publishing income or an assignment of the compositions to the company's publishing arm.

The arrangement is not new. Robbie Williams signed a deal with EMI in 2002 that is generally treated as the first major one, and promoters moved into the same territory soon after: Live Nation signed Madonna in 2007, then Jay-Z in 2008 in a deal the New York Times reported at $150 million. Those were deals for artists with existing global audiences, offered money against income the companies could see coming. That distinction matters, because the 360 deals an independent songwriter is actually offered are a different animal with the same name.

The publishing clause, and why it is the one to read first

Publishing has the longest tail of anything in a 360 deal, and it is the one stream most songwriters are already collecting before anybody offers them a contract.

Touring income stops when you stop touring. Merchandise follows the audience. Recording royalties keep arriving but decay with the catalog's streaming curve, and they belong to the master, which the company is usually paying to make. Publishing is different on both counts. It pays on a schedule set by copyright law rather than by promotion, from mechanical and performance royalties on every use of the composition in every country, for decades. And it was already yours.

So the clause that takes a piece of it is the expensive one, and it comes in two very different strengths.

A percentage of publishing income. The company takes an agreed share of what reaches you. Bad, but bounded: it is a cut of cash flow, it ends with the term plus whatever collection window the contract gives it, and it does not touch who owns the song.

An assignment to the company's publishing arm. You sign some share of the compositions over. This is a transfer of copyright, and it is a different order of commitment. The share keeps paying the company for as long as the grant runs, which can be decades past the end of the recording term, and the song is no longer wholly yours to take elsewhere.

If one clause is worth paying a lawyer to read, it is this one. Our walkthrough of what a publishing deal actually is covers the same distinction outside the 360 context, and the publisher share and writer share explainer covers which halves of the money a publishing clause can reach. The short version: your writer share is accounted to you by your performing rights organization, and the publisher share is accounted to whoever is registered as publisher. A 360 publishing clause is an instruction about who that is.

Two related clauses hide nearby and are worth finding in the same sitting. A controlled composition clause reduces what the label pays you in mechanicals on your own songs, below the statutory rate, which is a separate deduction from the publishing split. And the sunset clause governs how long the company keeps collecting after the term ends, which is often longer than people assume they agreed to.

The percentages everybody quotes, and why none of them are sourced

Here is the part we will take a side on.

Every explainer about 360 deals quotes percentages. Labels take 10 to 30% of touring. Merchandise runs 25 to 50%. Push for 15 to 25%. None of those figures can be sourced to anything, because a 360 deal is a private contract between two parties. There is no rate card, no regulator, no filing. The ranges circulating online come from lawyers generalizing about deals they have seen under confidentiality, which is useful color and is not a market rate.

That matters practically, not just pedantically. A songwriter who walks in believing 20% of touring is the standard has accepted a frame the other side wrote. There is no standard. There is only what this company will accept from you, which depends on what it is actually putting in and how much it wants you.

So treat every percentage you read, the ones above included, as somebody's recollection. Ask instead what the company is funding, in dollars, and what each percentage is calculated on. Gross or net is worth more than five points.

The one number in a 360 deal that is public

There is exactly one part of this arrangement with published figures, and it is the part the publishing clause is taking a slice of.

For US physical copies and permanent downloads, the mechanical royalty is set by law. The Copyright Royalty Judges adjust it each year for inflation, and the 2026 final rule puts it at 13.1 cents per work, or 2.52 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is larger. For interactive streaming there is no per-play rate at all. The Board sets an all-in publishing share of what the service earns, 15.3% of US service provider revenue in 2026, and the mechanical pool is what remains after the services deduct the performance royalties they have already paid. Our breakdown of what a mechanical royalty is walks through that subtraction, which surprises people.

The 13.1 cents and the 15.3% were both checked on 29 October 2026.

Why this is the useful number: you can calculate it. If a 360 deal takes a quarter of your publishing, you can work out what a quarter of 13.1 cents a copy is, and what a quarter of your share of a 15.3% pool looks like at your streaming volume. You cannot do that arithmetic on a touring percentage, because nobody knows what the tour will gross. Negotiate hardest where you can count.

When a 360 deal is the right call

It would be dishonest to write this page as though the answer is always no.

A 360 deal makes sense when the company is genuinely creating the income it wants a share of. If a label is funding recording, paying for marketing that builds an audience from nothing, booking the tour that sells the merchandise, then it has a real argument for participating in what that audience spends. That is an investment with a return, and refusing to share the return while taking the investment is not a principled position.

It stops making sense at the point where the company is taking a percentage of income it did not cause. Publishing is where that line gets crossed most often, because the songs usually existed before the deal. A clause that reaches compositions you wrote, registered and were already collecting on is charging you for work somebody else did. That is the thing to strike, and it is strikeable: a company that wants you will carve out the back catalog.

The honest test is not the percentage. It is whether each income stream in the deal would exist without the company. Where the answer is no, sharing it is fair. Where the answer is yes, you are paying rent on your own work.

What to ask before you sign

Five questions, in the order that saves the most money.

1. Does the publishing clause take income or ownership? A percentage of cash flow and an assignment of copyright are not variations of the same term. Find out which one you are being offered and get the answer in writing.
2. Which songs does it reach? Everything you have ever written, or only compositions created during the term? Back catalog should come out.
3. Gross or net, and whose costs? On touring and merchandise, the base is worth more than the rate. A percentage of gross with your expenses paid out of your share is a different deal from the same percentage of net.
4. How long does collection run after the term? The post-term window is where a deal you ended keeps costing you. Read it alongside the assignment clause.
5. What happens if the company stops working the record? Deals rarely end because the artist wants out. They go quiet. Ask what triggers a reversion and what you have to do to invoke it.

And one piece of law worth knowing before anybody tells you a grant is permanent. Section 203 of the Copyright Act lets an author terminate a transfer made on or after January 1, 1978, during a five-year window opening 35 years after the grant, on written notice served between two and ten years beforehand and recorded with the Copyright Office. It applies notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, which is the whole point of it. You cannot sign it away in advance. You also cannot use it next year.

The alternative nobody pitches you

A 360 deal answers the question "who will fund and build my career". It is a bad answer to the question "who will collect my publishing royalties", and the two get bundled because the company offering the first has an interest in also doing the second.

Publishing administration is the unbundled version. An administrator registers your compositions at the societies, collects the mechanical and performance royalties, and takes a commission on what it actually collects. It takes no ownership of your songs, and a non-exclusive one does not stop you signing a recording deal later. Our guide to publishing administration for independent songwriters covers how that works in practice. Davincii's commission is 15% on performance royalties and 20% on mechanicals, charged only on what we collect, and the full terms are on the pricing page.

That is not a substitute for a label if what you need is a label. It is a reason not to hand over your publishing to get one.