How Music Royalties Are Divided

Video Transcript

"ANTONIO NEAL: Hey, this is Antonio Neal with Artistic Soul Entertainment on behalf of Expert Village. Today, we're going to talk about copyrighting a song and also publishing the song. Now, we're going to talk about how do you split a song. There's a person that--it can be a person who say, "Man, I wrote all the lyrics," or you got a person who wrote the music to the song, and then now you've got a publisher who's involved in there. So you got, how do you settle that? Well, there are many, many, many ways that you can do that, and I don't think anyone is better than the other one but I can tell you a couple of ways that I have seen it done since my time here in Nashville. There have been a some of instances when I work with producers and writers where it is decided that no matter who participates or how much is given in the process, we're going to split the song equally. Meaning, every songwriter is going to split the song equally. So when you turn it in to your publisher, you automatically know that if you have a 20% of that song, you're going to turn it in to your publisher, and so that's one way. One way is some people believe that the person who writes the lyrics and the melody got a bigger percentage of the song. Really deciding the percentage is actually an individual thing. There is really no set rule for it. It's actually what you and the person you write with come up with, but I've learned that the 50-50 thing or the equal split actually keeps the bridges from being burned and you can have another day to write, write, write, and everybody forms a part in that situation. Now, in the terms of what your publisher gets out of your song, say if you wrote 20--if you get a song and you wrote 25% of the song, at the end of the day, it was four of you guys, you all split it down to the middle. Now, you say, "What did your publisher give?" because the overall money for song is like $1. So if you take $1, there's 50% normally going in for the publishers and there's 50% that's split for the writers, and so normally it's really up to your negotiation. When you're in there and you got an opportunity, get your toe in the door, and publishers like your songs, really understand that your value is your song, your value is your talent, so do your best. What I would say to cope up most of your music, meaning what? You get your share of the writer's percentage and also you get a share of the publisher experience because that's a lot of money. If your song is a success for you as songwriter that's actually what they call "placing cuts," getting cuts on records and everything, you want to make sure that you own as much as that copyright and actually that you're getting as much of that income back because actually you wrote the song."