Revisiting all those Collaboration Agreements

Recently, a very successful songwriter/recording artist has suggested re-recording the artist’s songs. Regardless of the situation that is apparently motivating the artist to do sound-alike recordings of the artist’s songs, the re-recording of the songs is bound to cause at least a few people to review a lot of documents. Why? Because the artist has co-written most of her songs with other songwriters.

By a quick count, over the course of a half-dozen or so albums, the songwriter/recording artist has collaborated with well over 30 different songwriters and, with some of those collaborators, the artist has co-written dozens of individual songs.

For every song (or at least for every album co-writing project), there is, hopefully, some written collaboration agreement and “split sheet” that would define the portion of each song’s revenue that would be due to each songwriter. The ratio among songwriters for each song may be different, as which writer contributed what portion to each song varied by each particular song.

Very fortunate for the folks who have to review these co-writer agreements that the successful songwriter/recording artist has been with the same music publisher since the beginning of the artist’s career because all of the songwriter collaboration agreements are probably under one roof. Also, the terms of the music publishing agreement between the songwriter/recording artist and the music publisher probably have not changed much over the years.

Unfortunately, folks will still have to review all the pertinent co-writer agreements, if only to confirm that the songwriter/recording artist (and music publisher) have retained 100% control and right to permit any other sound recording of the song, let alone a sound-alike re-creation. The collaboration and co-writing contracts (and copyright law) might not allow it. If the songwriter/recording artist (and music publisher) do not have complete control over the use and and exploitation of the song, then re-negotiations of the co-writer agreements will be required. [And this does not begin to consider the rights of the producers and collaborating musicians who were involved in the recording of the original master recordings of the song.]

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The thorniest issue may arise from the fact that each of the co-writers might very well have a music publishing agreement with a publisher other than the songwriter/recording artist’s music publisher. So, depending on whether the all the pertinent music publishers have a common administration agreement with the same administrator, the re-recording project may require permissions from quite a few persons and companies–per song.

Quote: “And now, an Industry Secret: Most of the time there is no agreement signed by the major publishers when they co-own a song with other publishers.” — Donald S. Passman, All You Need to Know About the Music Business (Ninth Edition, 2015), at page 331.

Good luck to the folks who have to revisit all those collaboration agreements, etc.



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