How to Start a Music Publishing Company

Most of what people mean by how to start a music publishing company is one specific, narrow thing: opening a publisher account at a performing rights organization so the publisher half of your performance royalties has an owner. That part has a price, and it is public. A publisher-only application costs a one-time, non-refundable $50 at ASCAP. BMI's publisher application form sets its fee by business structure, from $175 for an individually owned company up to $500 for a partnership.

The part that rarely makes it into a seven-step listicle: for US streaming mechanicals, you need no company at all. The MLC says so on its own site. So before you pick a name and pay anyone, it is worth knowing which of your royalties actually require a company and which do not.

What a music publishing company actually is

A song has two halves of income, and they are paid to two different identities. The writer share is paid to you as a person, by your performing rights organization, under your own name. The publisher share is paid to whoever is registered as the publisher on that song. Our explainer on the publisher share and the writer share covers the split in detail.

If nobody is registered as the publisher, the publisher share does not default to you. It sits unclaimed. That is the entire problem a publishing company solves, and it is a smaller problem than the phrase "start a music publishing company" suggests. You are not founding a business that signs talent. You are creating an identity that can appear on the publisher line of a registration.

A publishing company can do one thing your writer account cannot: hold shares in songs written by other people. If that is not in your plans, read the rest of this with the question "what am I buying?" in mind.

For US mechanicals, you do not need a company at all

This is the clearest answer on the page, and it comes straight from the organization in question. The MLC, which collects mechanical royalties from US streaming and downloads, states plainly that a self-administered songwriter does not need to create a legal entity such as a partnership, corporation or LLC before becoming a Member, and that many self-administered songwriters join as individual Members. Membership costs nothing.

In The MLC's own terms, a self-administered writer is simply one who acts as the publisher of the works they created. The role exists; the paperwork for it does not. Our guide to The MLC covers registration and payment timing.

One correction while we are here. The standard walkthroughs tell you to register as a publisher with The MLC, the Harry Fox Agency and Music Reports, as though all three were steps. The MLC answers the middle one directly: you do not need to affiliate with HFA in order to receive mechanical royalties from The MLC. The MLC also explains the division of labor behind that: it administers the blanket compulsory mechanical license, while companies such as HFA and Music Reports administer voluntary licenses, which is separate work. Neither is a step toward collecting what The MLC is holding for you. Our comparison of The MLC and HFA explains what HFA still does.

The publisher account at your PRO is the part that costs money

Performance royalties are where the company earns its fee, because this is the one system that will not release the publisher share to a writer account.

At ASCAP. Joining as a writer is free, though ASCAP words that as a suspension of its application fee rather than a permanent price of zero. A publisher-only application carries a one-time, non-refundable $50 processing fee, and ASCAP's membership help page adds the detail that decides your timing: if you join as a writer and a publisher at the same time, you pay nothing, and if you join as a writer now and add a publisher account later, the $50 applies. If you are even considering a publisher entity, open both at once. Our ASCAP guide covers the rest of the membership.

At BMI. Writer affiliation is free, and the publisher side is not. BMI's publisher application form prices affiliation by how the company is organized:

Every one of those is non-refundable and has to arrive with the application. The corporation and LLC categories also require a copy of your certificate of incorporation or articles of organization. Both the ASCAP and BMI figures were checked on 26 October 2026, and our BMI guide has the payment thresholds and distribution dates.

The online route for US publishers works differently on one point: BMI's join page says the application needs a credit card from a US bank for a one-time processing fee, without naming the amount. The application form above is where BMI publishes the actual schedule.

Two things follow from that table. First, the individually owned category is the cheap door, and it does not ask for an entity filing. Second, the fee is per publisher account, and the common industry guidance, including Songtrust's own walkthrough, is that a US publisher entity has to be affiliated with the same performing rights organization as the writer whose work it registers, which would mean paying twice to publish an ASCAP writer and a BMI writer. Neither society states that rule plainly on its public help pages, so confirm it with yours before you send a non-refundable fee. What the societies do confirm is that registrations are per-society: ASCAP says that if your co-writer belongs to a different organization, you still have to register the work with ASCAP for it to be tracked.

BMI's instructions also carry a warning worth repeating, because it is the most honest sentence in the whole process: affiliation as a publisher is likely to be of practical financial benefit only if you currently have compositions that are being performed, or are likely to be. If you have no releases out, the application is premature.

Naming the company is a clearance process, not a branding exercise

The step people treat as the fun one is actually the one most likely to send the application back. BMI rejects any name identical or similar to an established publishing company, asks for five name choices in order of preference, and excludes special characters, so "Bard Mason Music" is allowed where "Bard-Mason Music" is not. BMI clears and reserves the name; you then file with your Secretary of State, in that order, if you are forming an entity.

Do it the other way round and you can pay a state filing fee for a company name your performing rights organization will not accept.

What the job becomes once the paperwork is done

Here is the part that the fee table does not price, and one place to kill a myth while we are at it. You do not file each song twice. ASCAP states that a member holding both a writer and a publisher membership registers a title once, and it appears automatically in the catalog of every entitled party named on that registration. What you take on is not duplicate filing. It is accuracy: the publisher has to be named on every registration with the right split, and at ASCAP the writer side totals 50% and the publisher side 50% rather than 100% each, which is a routine cause of a registration that bounces or quietly conflicts with a co-writer's.

Then the same job at The MLC, for every song. Then every co-writer's legal name, society and IPI number, collected and correct, because one wrong digit on a writer line is a registration a society refuses.

Then there is the rest of the world. Your performing rights organization passes along some foreign performance income under reciprocal agreements, and collecting the rest means arrangements with societies territory by territory. Our guide to international royalty collection covers how sub-publishing and administration differ there.

None of this is hard. It is just permanent, and it arrives every time you release something. The songwriters we administer have 21,000+ songs between them, and each one is a separate filing in each system that could pay it. That is the shape of the work, and it is why "I will register them myself this weekend" so reliably becomes "I registered the first nine."

When starting your own publishing company is worth it

Our honest opinion, and it costs us business to say it: for a songwriter who only ever publishes their own catalog, forming a publishing company is a $175 to $500 way to buy yourself a second job, and the job never ends.

It is clearly the right move in three cases.

• You intend to publish other writers. A publishing company can hold shares in someone else's song. A writer account cannot. If you are signing co-writers or releasing other people's music on your own label, you need the entity, and the fee is trivial next to what it enables.
• You already do the admin work and like it. Some writers genuinely enjoy the filing, keep clean split sheets, and would rather hold 100% of the publisher share than pay a commission. That is a legitimate choice, and it is the only route where nobody takes a percentage.
• A deal requires it. Certain arrangements, including some sync and label deals, want a publisher entity on the other side of the paper.

Outside those three, the question is not whether the publisher share should be collected. It should. The question is whose evenings do it. A publishing administrator registers its own publisher entity on your works and collects that same publisher share for a commission, without taking any ownership of your songs. What publishing administration is covers how that differs from a publishing deal, and do I need a music publisher works through the breakeven.

How Davincii fits

We are the administrator in that last paragraph. Our publisher entity goes on your registrations, we file each song at your society and at The MLC, we chase the foreign side, and you keep 100% of your copyright. There is no upfront fee and no application charge: we take 15% of performance royalties and 20% of mechanicals, from money we actually recover. The pricing page has the full terms.

If you already run your own publishing company, keep it. Tell us its name, its society and its own IPI number when you sign up, and it stays the publisher on your registrations while we administer for it. That is a normal arrangement, not a conflict, and it is worth asking any administrator about before you sign.

Either way, the decision worth making carefully is not the company name. It is whether the publisher share on every song you have released is currently being claimed by anybody at all. If the answer is no, that is the thing to fix this month. Create your account when you are ready, or read how to register a song first.