Establishing what you own
Working out which rights sit where across the recording and the underlying work, and what evidence stands behind each.
Music
Ownership and splits.
A commercially released track ordinarily carries more than one copyright, and they can be owned by different people. Splits are the record of who agreed to what. In most disputes the argument is not about the shares, it is about whether anything was ever agreed at all.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The usual version starts in a room where nobody is thinking about ownership. A producer sends a beat, a friend adds a topline, somebody in the corner suggests the line that becomes the hook, and the session ends with a track everyone is pleased with and nothing written down. Long afterwards the track begins to matter, and every person in that room has a different memory of what was said.
The second version is a confusion between the recording and the song. An artist who paid for the studio and holds the master assumes that settles it, then discovers the writers of the underlying work are separately entitled, and that a licence of one is not a licence of the other. The same confusion runs the other way for writers who assume that having written the song gives them control over a recording of it.
Beat licences do the same damage quietly. Instrumentals bought from an online store arrive on terms that vary considerably and are rarely read, and some of them permit a release without transferring anything at all. The artist believes the beat was bought. What was bought was permission, on conditions, and sometimes conditions that stop applying once the track is used beyond a certain point.
The last version arrives with a transaction or a departure. A catalogue is sold and the artist finds that the party they now deal with is a company they have never spoken to. A relationship ends and the files, the accounts and the credits sit with whoever set them up. In neither case has anything changed legally, which is exactly the problem. The position stays where the paperwork left it.
What actually decides it
A commercially released track ordinarily involves more than one copyright. There is the sound recording, and there is the underlying musical work with any lyrics. These are separate rights, they can be owned by different people, and they are dealt with separately in almost every agreement in the industry. Performers also have rights in recordings of their performances, which sit apart from the rights of whoever owns the recording. Durations differ between a recording and the underlying work and are fixed by statute rather than by anything the parties agree.
Copyright in the UK is not registered, so there is no official list to point at. Proving what you own falls to your own records: dated session files and stems, correspondence, credits as released, and evidence of what each person contributed and was paid. That material is ordinary and unglamorous and it decides most of these arguments, because the alternative is competing recollection.
Authorship of the underlying work turns on contribution to the composition and the lyrics, not on having been in the building. A producer may be an author of the recording, and may also have contributed to the work itself, and which of those is true depends on what was actually done rather than on the job title used at the time. This is where the genuinely difficult cases sit, and it is why a split written down at the session is worth more than any argument made later.
Ownership moves by written assignment signed by the person holding the right, with work created by an employee in the course of employment as the main exception. Paying somebody, crediting them generously, or years of untroubled use may give you something to argue about, but none of them reliably transfers a right. When a catalogue is sold, the buyer takes what the seller had and the agreements travel with it, so whatever the contract said about accounting, approvals or the return of rights continues to apply, whoever owns it now.
What we do
Splits, written down
Getting the agreement recorded and signed while everybody is still speaking to each other.
Reconstructing the record
Assembling credits, files, payments and correspondence into something that can be relied on.
Assignments that work
Documents that actually move a right, in place of emails everybody assumed had.
Transfers and catalogue changes
Checking what passes and what survives when rights change hands.
Competing claims
Resolving disputed contributions quietly, before positions harden in public.
When to spend nothing
Not every unresolved split deserves resolving. A track nobody is playing, a collaboration that went nowhere, a contributor who left music long ago: documenting those properly will usually cost more than they earn. The test is whether the asset earns, or looks likely to, or whether somebody is about to ask you to prove you own it.
There is also a cost to asking. Approaching a former collaborator about a split tells them they may hold something worth money, and a person who had never given it a thought can become a claimant. Where your position is strong and nobody is pressing, good records and silence are frequently the better plan.
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.