To kick off the NewMusicShelf blog, I’ll be posting a four-part discussion on self-publication for composers.
The Difference between Publication and Distribution
As I’ve gone about promoting NewMusicShelf to composers, I’ve been getting regular questions and comments about “publishing”, which leads me to believe that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding over the difference between Publishing and Distribution. Because traditional publishing houses automatically distribute scores (or, more likely, have distribution agreements with other companies who act as middleman between publisher and retailer, or sometimes publisher and customer – think SheetMusicPlus.com, Amazon.com, iTunes), it’s very easy to see publication and distribution as two sides of the same coin. They are, in a way, because of the way that the industry has been structured: a symbiosis has sprung up between various publishing houses and distribution companies, and we tend not to consider how the scores we buy get to our favorite music shop.
But once you move outside of the traditional publishing world, the differences between publication and distribution become more clear.
The publication of a score involves the engraving of the score, and, with bound scores, the printing and binding processes, or, in the case of digital scores, the creation of a readable, finished file, such as a PDF. That is where publication technically ends – the creation of the finished score. It’s up to the distributor to get it to stores or websites, and ultimately, the consumer.
Distribution is the act of making the score publicly available and accessible – getting it to stores, selling it online.
This is what NewMusicShelf does. You, as the composer, publish your own score – you have engraved it and created a readable PDF file. You are the publisher. When you sell your scores through NewMusicShelf, the company acts as distributor only.
If NMS were a publisher, the company would be responsible for the final look of the engraved score and the cover design. This is obviously not the case. [This is, however, a goal that I have for the company. In a few years, I'd like to add the option of distributing printed, bound scores in addition to digital scores, which will make it very easy to begin a publishing imprint.]
Because the basic act of publishing is so simple now, thanks to engraving software like Sibelius and Finale, distribution is the major challenge for self-publishing composers.
