Dear Harlow,
It seems unbelievable that, after all these years, you have never done business with Festival Music, Ltd. But there always has to be a first time. To answer your question about royalties for writers of music and lyrics, our contracts are drawn up quite differently from those of other music publishers. In specifying author’s rights, we generally offer a much higher royalty than the conventional publisher. Why? Because we leave it up to the authors and/or their agents to undertake the initial stages of production. Since we do have to maintain a production studio on our premises, this preliminary step cuts our overhead immensely and thus make it possible to increase the royalty scale. Expressed from another viewpoint, our policy puts a greater demand on authors and agents at the start, asking them o get the ball rolling. But then they share greater profits when everything is in motion.
Sincerely,