Royalty Statements

            Anybody who has spent anytime at all working with artists and songwriters will have, at one point or another, tried to review  a royalty statement.  For the longest time, these were multi page documents, often impossible to decipher (sometimes intentionally).  It was (and is) important to review these documents carefully because most contracts only give a relatively short amount of time to object to incorrect accounting information.  For example, I once

had a client who had a top 10 single, which wasn't being reported by his publisher because the information had been keyed in incorrectly.  Luckily, that was easy to correct but I would worry if we had waited longer than the objection period in the agreement to  bring this up.

            Today I would  guess that most of this information is being transmitted electronically and I don't know how carefully it is being scrutinized.  These statements are also much less interesting in these days of streaming when countless lines of reporting are being used to tally pennies of income.

 

            This is why it was so intriguing to come upon these pages of royalty statements intended for the songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney from Northern Songs in late 1970.  Like so much Beatles ephemera, these pages ended up on an online auction site, but it is fascinating to see the reported earnings for songs like "The Word," "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "It's Only Love" and see references to those exotic foreign  entities such as Toshiba, Leeds Holland, Odeon and Sonora Sweden.  The whole world of international sub publishing was fascinating at that time.  I love this stuff.  It’s a view to history and a reminder that, as old publishers used to say,  music publishing  truly is a penny business.