Ownership and splits
Who owns the recording, who owns the song, and what happens when the contributions were never written down.
Practice
Music.
An artist is two things at once. A copyright owner, and a brand. What tends to arrive here is ownership nobody recorded at the time, and money that was earned but never reached the person who earned it.
What sits here
Music sits across both sides of what we do. The recordings and the songs are copyright work. Everything built on top of them, the name, the artwork, the merchandise, the live show, is brand. A dispute about a track is almost always also a dispute about a relationship, and it rarely stays inside one of those two categories. These pages are arranged the way the problems actually turn up.
What we handle
Deals and contracts
Recording, publishing, management, distribution and sync agreements, read properly before they are signed.
Royalties
Registration and metadata decide whether money arrives, and income that was earned does not always reach the right person.
Sampling and clearance
Permission for a sample ordinarily has to cover both the recording and the underlying work, and clearing one is not clearing the other.
Piracy and enforcement
Unlicensed use, leaks and bootlegs, removal at scale, and finding out who is actually behind it.
Artist brands
The name, the logo and the merchandise, which sit on brand rights rather than on the copyright in the music.
Band splits
Line up changes, who keeps the name, and what the band actually owned together.
How this usually arrives
Most of this work arrives late. A track has been out for a while, it is doing well enough to matter, and somebody now needs to know who owns it. A label wants to license it, an advertiser wants to use it, a distributor is asking for signed confirmation of the splits, and the paperwork that everybody assumed existed does not.
The second route is money. Someone notices that a release earning attention is not earning what it should, or a payment that used to arrive has stopped, or a co writer discovers they were never registered anywhere. That is usually a records problem before it is a dispute, and it is worth establishing which it is before anybody sends an angry email.
The third is a relationship ending. A band splits, a manager is dismissed, a producer and an artist fall out, and everything that was comfortable while everyone got along becomes a question of what was actually agreed. The answer is generally found in what was written at the time, and where nothing was written, in credits, conduct and payment history.
When to spend nothing
Not every unresolved split is worth resolving. A track nobody is playing, a collaboration that produced nothing anybody wants, a contributor who left the industry long ago: settling those properly usually costs more than they will ever earn, and raising them tells the other side that something might be worth having.
There is also a version where waiting is the strategy. Where your position is strong, nobody is pressing, and the records are in order, silence is frequently better than a letter that hardens a position you are not yet ready to support.
Insights
Reading on music
- Bootleg merchandise and the rights that actually stop it
- Clearing a sample: what the permission actually has to cover
- Music income that was earned and never reached anybody
- Producer agreements and beat licences: what exclusivity buys
- Publishing agreements: what a songwriter gives up and what remains
- Reading a recording agreement before it is signed
- Song splits nobody recorded, and what decides them afterwards
- The band name when a line up ends, and what decides who keeps it
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.