I have been asked to play on a 6-song EP for an unknown artist. It's very good music (IMO), but I doubt it will ever end up making any significant splash in the music scene.
But, one never knows...
The offer was $100-per-track ($600 total) for the session, or 1/4 of the publishing... and I'm not sure which to take. (It may be of interest that I have written all the bass lines myself.)
$600 now would be quite handy. But what if fate determines that these songs hit the big-time (which, as I said, seems unlikely to me)? Publishing could bring some nice coin.
Anyway, this is a very small project... I'm just on the fence about which to take, and thought the TB community could offer some insight.
TIA
Assuming you mean they’ve agreed to give 25% of the copyright in each song, then it won’t take a lot of success to get to $600. And after that point, of course, you’ll have an on-going income stream thereafter.
Let’s look at some basic math. Every time a song sells on iTunes in the US, there’s supposed to be 9.1 cents set aside from the sale price and that 9.1 cents is supposed to be paid to the publisher (or publishers) of the song in accordance with the percentage of the song the publisher controls. If there is 1 publisher on one song (i.e., one person wrote 100% of the song), then all 9.1 cents would go to that publisher. If there were 2 publishers that each controlled 50% of the song, then each publisher would receive 4.55 cents each for each iTunes sale in the US. And so on.
Accordingly, if you are to be paid 2.3 cents (i.e., 25% of 9.1 cents) for each iTunes sale, then it would take sales of26,000 single units to reach $600 in publishing royalties. The 26,000 is a cumulative total so if an EP is sold, then that counts as 6 units (i.e., 2.3 x 6 = 13.8 cents for each EP x 4,300 units = $600). That is, it can be a combination of sales of individual songs or the EP as a whole.
However, the royalty rate I discussed above only addresses “sales” of the song (e.g., iTunes). There are tons of other ways that songs make money that don’t involve sales (e.g., radio performances, licensing, etc.). If one of the songs got licensed in a small to moderate budget movie or television production, it certainly wouldn’t be unusual to see a fee of $1,000-$2,000 which means your 25% share would be $250-$500 on that one sync license alone.
If you think those songs have potential value, these may be dice you want to roll.
Just make sure that there’s an email with all song titles with all writer splits for each song clearly listed and make sure all writers reply to the email saying the splits are agreed as set forth in the email (or in separate emails if you want to address titles individually).
Writers of songs can agree to split the copyright percentages of songs however they want regardless of the level of contribution. For example, it’s a common ethos in Nashville that if three people sit down in room together to write a song, then the song is split equally three ways. It’s not necessarily a function of who wrote how much. It’s considered a community effort and, in fact, it could be that someone’s only contribution is regarding the hook, but that contribution takes the hook from average to great. It’s not necessarily fair to say someone only deserves 5% of a song based on quantitative contribution when most of the “value” of the song significantly changed based on the small contribution
Our discussions in the past regarding bass lines revolve around the legal basis for making a claim that a bass line in a song is a copyrightable contribution to the authorship of a musical composition (i.e., in addition to the lyrics and the melody). My opinion is that it is not a sound basis except in very rare circumstances. However, as I said, there is nothing preventing songwriters to agree IN WRITING that a song is to be divided up however all the writers feel is fair.
Best,
MA
...and a special thanks to Music Attorney for laying out the details for me!
