Silver Clef Music Publications, Inc.
ROYALTIES AND FEES
How Much We Pay – And Charge
As of February, 2005
Silver Clef Music Publications, Inc. wants to make more music more available to more people. One of the ways we will do this is by charging less for our titles and paying you – the writer – more. We can afford to do this because of our unique business model of publishing digitally.
Here is a summary of the royalties we will pay for published works, and the fees we charge for services we provide.
NOTE: THIS RATE SHEET IS VALID FROM THE DAY OF AUTHORSHIP (see “As of” above) THROUGH THE LAST DAY OF JUNE OR DECEMBER (whichever comes next) OF THE YEAR IT WAS WRITTEN. If you are outside these dates, please write us for an updated ROYALTIES AND FEES Document.
ROYALTIES
Silver Clef Music Publishing, Inc., will pay the following royalty rates to the composer or arranger submitting a work.
CLASS A ROYALTY:
The current Class A Royalty Rate is 30% of the sales price. This means if we sell a copy of your work for $50, you will receive a $15 royalty on that sale.
CONDITIONS:
The Class A Royalty Rate will be paid for all submissions of original works, or arrangements whose copyrights are in order, when that submission includes the following:
MUSIC: The following music in PDF and Finale or Sibelius format. The music must be formatted in accordance with the Silver Clef Music Publications document “Manuscript Formatting Guidelines,” or in a format otherwise acceptable to SCMP management. The items listed below are the minimum requirements. You may submit more than the listed items if it is appropriate for your submission.
For Instrumental Ensemble Music, or Ensemble with Vocal:
Full Score
Condensed Score
Parts for each instrument
Vocal Score (when applicable) with rehearsal accompanist part
For Solo with Accompaniment Music:
Score (solo part and rehearsal accompanist part)
Solo Part (not needed for vocal solos)
(If more than one instrument accompanies, see also Ensemble Music, above.)
For Choral Music:
Full Vocal Score (All parts and accompaniment)
A recording of the music, played by live performers, with permission to post the recording on our website.
The following text material, formatted in accordance with our “Text Material Guidelines.”
Info Blurb about this piece
Program Notes
Bio Sketch
The bottom line is that if you will submit to us all the things we need, such that all we need to do is evaluate your work and post it on our website, then you will qualify for the Class A Royalty Rate.
CLASS B ROYALTY
The current Class B Royalty Rate is 20% of the sales price. This means if we sell a copy of your work for $50, you will receive a $10 royalty on that sale.
CONDITIONS:
The Class B Royalty Rate will be paid for all submissions that meet all qualifications of the Class A Rate except the digital submission part.
This rate is available only to submissions of previously published works to which you have regained the copyright, or to paper submissions of works by established writers. Determination of Class B Royalty Rate eligibility will be at the sole discretion of Silver Clef Music Publications.
For this rate, we must have all of the music, recording, and text submissions as for the Class A Royalty, except that the music submissions may be paper-based. The paper-based submissions must comply with all proper formatting guidelines. We will scan in these submissions and create PDFs for distribution.
CLASS C ROYALTY
The current Class C Royalty Rate is 10% of the sales price. This means if we sell a copy of your work for $50, you will receive a $5 royalty on that sale.
CONDITIONS:
The Class C Royalty Rate will be paid for handwritten manuscripts that meet all the other qualifications for the Class A Royalty Rate.
This rate is available only to submissions of previously published works to which you have regained the copyright, or to paper submissions of works by established writers. Determination of Class C Royalty Rate eligibility will be at the sole discretion of Silver Clef Music Publications.
For this rate, we must have all of the music, recording, and text submissions as for the Class A Royalty, except that the music submissions may be hand-written. We will do the typesetting/engraving/notation of these works, and will create the PDFs suitable for digital distribution.
FEES
You may have noticed that we only offer the Class B and Class C royalty rates to established writers. The only royalty rate open to new writers is the Class A Royalty rate, and that rate requires the music be already typeset (engraved, notated) in one of the professional notation packages, and that the music files must also be provided in Adobe’s PDF format.
What then are new writers to do, if they do not have this software?
Silver Clef Music Publishing offers Engraving Services, Music Editing Services, and File Conversion Services on a fee-for-service basis.
We use experienced professionals to accomplish and supervise these services, and guarantee them unconditionally.
We offer these services both to authors submitting works for publication, and for those who want it done for their own use.
Our fee for any of these services is a flat $25 per hour.
To give some perspective to this fee, let’s use two examples, a brass quintet and a concert band piece.
If your piece is about 135 measures long, has a couple of repeats, and no really squirrely unusual things in it, you can figure it will take approximately an hour per part, plus a couple hours of overhead to enter it into the software, extract the parts, format the parts, produce a full score and a condensed score, then to create PDFs from each of them.
For a brass quintet, this would equate to somewhere between seven and eight hours work, which at $25 an hour, would cost about $200.
For a concert band, with anywhere from 21 to 30 different instrumental parts, you would be looking at a total cost of between $600 and $1,200, depending on complexity.
Let’s take that one step farther, and see how that compares to sales.
If you sell your brass quintet arrangement for $20 and your band arrangement for $50, at the Class A Royalty Rate of 30%, you would make $6 on each quintet sale, and $15 on each band sale. This means you would have made back your expenditure and would start making money after only 34 quintet sales or 40-80 band sales (depending on how much your fees were). Once you doubled your break-even-point sales, you would have made the amount of all your fees back again.
WHY DO WE DO IT THIS WAY?
In short, to keep our costs down so we can pay the higher royalties. Other publishers do all of this for you – BUT – they are very selective in which music and which authors they’ll accept for publication (they have to be, it’s very expensive to pay people to do this stuff!), and they only pay a maximum royalty of 10% of the sales price.
We figure that with most people today already using good notation software, it’s not unreasonable to expect that authors can already provide what we require.
And finally, one of our goals is to pay our authors at least twice as much, in real dollars, as they could get from any other publisher. By keeping our costs down, we can sell for less, pay you more, and still have funds to do good promotion of your works.
Silver Clef Music Publications, Inc. – Royalties And Fees Page 4 of 4