There are, literally, tens of thousands of music publishers, ranging from multi-national organizations to individual songwriters with very small catalogues. Finding a particular one can be time-consuming. For this reason, music publishers have formed larger bodies to centralize and standardize the process of licensing and collecting royalties. One such organization is CMRRA.
CMRRA represents the majority of music publishers doing business in Canada and can generally issue most of the mechanical licences you’ll need for your product. You can perform a search of CMRRA’s Repertoire here.
In some cases, however, there may be songs (or portions of songs) that we do not represent. In those cases, it’s your responsibility to obtain licences for the missing shares. There are a number of online resources available to locate copyright owners. The following organizations each have searchable online databases that we have found to be helpful in this regard:
http://www.socan.ca
http://www.ascap.com/
http://www.bmi.com/
http://www.sesac.com/
http://www.sodrac.ca/
