Working As a Staff Writer
For many songwriters, earning enough money to allow them to quit their day job and devote 100 percent of their energies to their creative pursuit is the ultimate dream. This is most often accomplished by signing a staff-writing deal.
It's hard to imagine the music publishing industry without the concept of staff-writing. Every major music publishing company has staff-writers under contract and almost every song on the charts was written by a writer affiliated with a publishing company. Only a handful of songwriters who are not also recording artists have ever achieved and sustained major success without being signed to a publishing company at some point in their careers.
What Staff-Writing Really Means
"Staff-writing" is a misnomer, as a staff-writer is neither an employee nor a staff member of a publishing company, but a songwriter who has entered into an agreement to publish all of his or her songs exclusively with one music publisher. Being a staff-writer essentially means that during the term of a songwriter's contract with a publisher, all songs, melodies, and lyrics that the writer creates are automatically published by the company to which he or she is signed.
Being a staff-writer is synonymous with signing an exclusive songwriting agreement, a contract that defines the terms under which a writer's songs are published by a given publishing company. While the agreement (sometimes called a term songwriting agreement) is in force, a staff-writer is signed exclusively to one publisher, foregoing the right to publish his or her work elsewhere.
Staff-writers receive neither a salary nor employee fringe benefits, such as health insurance or a retirement plan from the music publisher to whom they are signed. Any money they receive is considered an advance to be recouped against their future royalties. At the same time, they are not required to keep set hours or to work at their publisher's offices either.
Staff-writers, however, are required to deliver an agreed upon quota of songs per year. The number of songs a staff-writer is required to write and turn in to his or her publisher is referred to as the delivery requirement and is specified within the exclusive publishing agreement. It typically ranges from 10 to 15 songs annually. But this number only applies if the staff-writer is the sole author of each song he or she writes. To meet a 12-song-per-year quota, if all of a staff-writer's songs are co-written, 24 songs must be delivered. Likewise, songs that result from a three-way collaboration are counted as one-third of a song.
A staff-writer's song delivery requirement is expressed within their exclusive songwriting agreement as the number of songs that must be turned in monthly, quarterly, or annually, for example, one song per month; three songs per quarter; or 12 songs per year.