Songwriting - who owns what?

If you wish anyone else in your musical collaboration, you are going to have to decide how to divide these two areas of royalty income in songwriting so that more people can earn from it. By understanding this, musicians can set up their songwriting understanding and accreditation in a manner that recognises the input of everyone and prevents later arguments over rights, money and credit.

 

This is not a process that many creative people enjoy. What needs to occur is as follows. Once a song is complete, the input of each writer is determined as a percentage of the whole. If a certain part is most important, it gets a greater weight than the other parts.

 

Everyone is recognised

 

For example, if your singer brought in the lyrics and the melody, 50% of the credit for the song goes to him. The remaining 50% is then assigned to the drummer, bass player, guitarist, DJ, keyboardist or what have you, provided they each wrote their own parts. In this way, everyone is recognised for their role, and is also rewarded financially through publishing royalties according to their percentage of ownership. Many musicians find this a very undesirable way to handle affairs and basically assign an equal proportion of ownership for songwriting amongst all members if they work collaboratively. So if the group has five members, each owns 20% of the songwriting publishing rights and so on. Deciding on stakes is very important as it makes it possible for the band to earn money off its songwriting as well as its performance and CD sales. 

 

In other words, the band earns from making money at the door, but also from other people playing their music. If anyone else records a version of their song, then everyone gets his or her share. If the radio plays the song repeatedly, there is a share of royalty that goes to each member under the performance rights as administered by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO). Artists register their work with this organisation, which then collects money from radio and TV stations on your behalf, before distributing it to you every year.

 

 

Balance of power

 

There are solid and practical business reasons for recognising the rights of ownership of songs, as we have seen above and will see in greater detail later. But there is also a very practical, political reason as well.

 

Musical groups are collaborations that involve individuals. As with any such grouping there are more and less influential people in each group. By asserting the rights of all individuals you rule out the possibility of the dominant personality benefiting unfairly from everyone else’s labour. You also make it clear who is in charge. If one person is indeed creating all the music that the others are merely playing, recognising this with your songwriting credit means that this person has more say in what the band does than anyone else, even if that person is outnumbered, and the members need to understand this. But in a band where collaboration is the norm, a dominant personality cannot be allowed to railroad the others.

 

Sheer hard-nosed business

 

None of this fits in with popular myths about the music industry. In truth it is a sheer hard-nosed business, with no romance or glamour. The reason that acknowledging this is so important is that, without the proper structure behind your music, fighting and failure are always just around the corner. In order to avoid bitter recriminations and fights over money and prestige later, musicians are well advised to look hard at the business side of this industry very early on. Nearly all of the horror stories that abound in this industry sprang from the ignorance of those involved who gave away what they shouldn’t have and then couldn’t legally get it back. In short, they were ignorant, did nothing to resolve that ignorance and in effect orchestrated their own demise.

 

Originally published in David Chislett's One, Two, One, Two: A Step By Step Guide To The South African Music Industry. Download a free copy of the book at www.davidchislett.co.za.