Same deal structure. Very different outcomes.

Take a writer who has just signed a co-publishing deal, 200 songs in the catalogue. They expected hustle: calls to music supervisors, pitches to labels, sync leads. What lands instead is a quarterly statement and silence. Meanwhile, a peer on a near-identical deal hears their own song in a car ad, a track the publisher had been pushing for eight months.

Same contract, opposite experience. The difference has a name your client needs to understand: plug song versus catalogue song.