A Brief History of Music Publishing
What it Was and What it Is |
With the continued changes in technology - and the resultant changes in the music industry - music publishers have endeavored to interpret and improve copyright law and to educate the music industry and the public about licensing, in addition to collecting royalties for the use of its songwriters' and composers' music.
As the music industry has evolved from piano rolls to vinyl records to compact discs to MP3s and beyond, music publishers have remained committed to working to achieve the best possible compensation for their copyright owners.
Music publishing in the U.S. has gone through almost as many changes over the years as publishing itself. Long before there was such a body as the National Music Publishers' Association (or its progenitor, the Music Publishers' Protective Association) - in fact, before there even was a United States - visitors to bookstores in Boston, New York and Philadelphia could peruse and purchase music instruction books, often based around psalms and other religious works.
With advances in mechanical printing making the process more accessible and affordable, American printers began publication of inexpensive selections of popular songs, complete with musical notation. By the end of the 18th century, businesses devoted to music publishing had been firmly established, while newspapers and magazines also published ballads, lyrics and other musical works on a regular basis.
The rapid rise in sheet music sales of popular music during the 1850s and '60s, thanks in large part to such songwriters and composers as Stephen Foster and George Frederick Root, resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of works being registered with the Copyright Bureau -- essentially doubling every five years. With the boom in business, a group of 27 major publishers confederated in 1855 as the Board of Trade of the Music Publishers of the United States, also referred to as the Board of Music Trade.
The seismic changes wrought by Thomas Edison's invention in the 1880s of the phonograph cylinder - providing eager consumers the opportunity to enjoy recorded music in their homes - led directly to a revised Copyright Act. That revision, which became law in 1909, created a new mechanical right for publishers, composers, authors, and songwriters, requiring a royalty of two cents for each cylinder, recording, or paper music roll manufactured. From 1890 to 1909, the wholesale value of printed music rose over 300% to $5.5 million - equivalent to a whopping $113 million today -- with over 25,000 new songs entered for copyright registration. Over 27 million phonograph records and cylinders were manufactured in 1909, at an estimated wholesale value of just under $12 million - equivalent to $246.4 million today.
Quite an achievment for its time - and just a foretaste of where the music business was headed: for calendar year 2005, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the retail value of the music industry was $12.27 billion.
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