Leflaw.com

A "music publishing agreement" is a copyright contact that a song writer signs with a music publishing company. Per this publishing agreement, a publisher is assigned certain designated copyrights . In accordance with the terms of the publishing deal, a music publisher basically "owns" or "rents" some (or all) of your songs for a certain period time and in a certain territory, administrating and exploiting your musical product as much as possible in order to generate more income for you and them. A music publisher agreement seeks to either assign or license certain songs to a music publisher to either own and/or administrate for a designated time and in a specified territory. Thus, a music publishing agreement is an agreement between a songwriter (who owns the copyright in songs) and the music publisher (which seeks to own or administrate the songs.)