Music Publishing Is Real Estate, Not Merchandise
Why Songs Outperform Sounds
Most people chase music rights like they chase hits—loud, fast, and short-lived. But the most valuable music assets aren’t the ones everyone hears. They’re the ones that keep getting licensed, reused, reinterpreted, and quietly paid for—decades after the spotlight fades.
That’s publishing.
If you could only own one part of a song—either the master recording or the underlying composition—you should choose the publishing rights almost every time. Not because they pay more today, but because they endure, compound, and scale. Publishing is IP infrastructure. Masters are content.
This isn’t about theory. It’s about rights, revenue, and long-term asset performance.
1. Publishing Is Infrastructure. Masters Are Products.
A master recording is the recorded performance—the sound file you hear on Spotify or Apple Music. It’s what gets marketed, streamed, and synched into media. It’s perishable.
Publishing, by contrast, is the legal right to the composition itself—the melody, lyrics, structure, and cre…