Songwriting Collaboration AgreementsSongwriting Collaboration Agreements are provided here. When you collaborate with another songwriter and write a song, copyright law call you "joint owners" of the song you create together. It doesn't matter which one of you write the lyrics or music or both. You are deemed to have "undivided" rights or ownership in what you wrote. That is, 50% of the song is yours and 50% is the other writers share. The copyright covers both the lyrics and music. Collaborating on a song is working to create together a single song, doesn't matter who did the lyrics or music. This happens even if you do not formalize the co-write with a collaboration agreement. There's no specification that the work each of you put into it has to be equal. That applies to how much you each wrote or how "great" each of you wrote. Formal written agreements aren't necessary but they can make it clear who owns what rights. For example, if one person writes the lyrics and the other the music, then they equally own all the song 50/50% regardless of who wrote the lyrics or music. Doesn't matter how much each of you contributed to the song. A good example of this is Elton John and Bernie Taupin. If you want ownership to be something other than 50/50% you should have an agreement setting out what the exact arrangement is. You can divide it up how you like. Normally a three way co-write would give each of the writers a 33% share in the total song. 25% if it were four co-writers. Using an Agreement for collaborating. One way co-writers have formally divided songs is to look at the lyrics being worth 50% and the music 50%. So the people writing the lyrics share equally in that 50% while whoever writes the music shares in the other 50%. Again this only works if you have some sort of a formal collaboration agreement. Otherwise its just divided up by how many collaborators there were. Here are two websites you can go to and get a songwriting collaboration agreement. Is My Song Good is a free site where you register and then fill in the blanks. You then print you personalized document. An example in a PDF file is also available for downloading at Songwriting-Software.com. |
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