Navigating Copyright Issues: Ownership of Compositions

[cuthbertdavies]

Hi,

I'm facing a complex copyright situation regarding composition ownership. I composed a piece of music initially for a solo project, but I never officially released it. I have all the timestamped evidence proving that I created the music. Later on, I decided to incorporate that composition into a band project. There were no alterations made to the music except for the addition of drums, and the singer wrote lyrics to accompany it. However, the band disbanded before releasing the song. Am I still legally entitled to claim copyright over the original composition?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[AndyJ]

Hi cuthbert and welcome to the forums.

The short answer to your question is Yes. If you are just concerned about exploiting your music, you can stop reading. If you want to know more about the rights involved in the song as performed by the band, read on.

The long answer is:

From what you have told us, your situation is a long way from being as complicated as some cases. As I see it there are three elements to the song as performed by the band. Your music, the beat or drum part, and the lyrics. Each is easily distinguishable from the other and so this is not a work of joint authorship. You are co-authors. Let's look at the musical elements first. You and the drummer share the musical credit based on the originality of his drum contribution. If he just added a steady commonplace beat or rhythm which any drum machine could have produced, his contribution is relatively small. Also if he copied a beat taken from another artist or band, his contribution is small. Beyond those two situations it becomes a subjective judgement about how much each element adds to the overall song. If you google 'music splits' you will find a number of written and video explanations about how these work.

The lyrics are entirely separate and any copyright in them belongs to the singer. You then need to conduct a similar assessment of the overall song, judging the value of the contributions of the music and the lyrics. If you can't agree a split for the overall song, the default will tend to be 50:50.

So if you are considering registering your song with PRSforMusic the formula might, for example, look something like Music: you 80% / drummer 20%; Lyrics: singer: 100%. Overall composition: you 40%, drummer 10%, singer 50%. Registering in this way is vital if you want to consider somewhere like Spotify as an outlet for your music. You are probably going to get ripped off by any streaming service, so it might as well be on a basis which is fair to each of you!

I'm assuming here that you made your own recording of the song. If you didn't and there's a fourth person who was responsible for that (let's call him the 'producer' although that may not be accurate), then he owns the copyright in the sound recording, unless you employed and paid him to specifically do the work on your behalf as an empolyee.

You all have the right to agree or disagree to any other exploitation of your song, for instance any grand or sync rights (you need to google these if you don't know what they are). Each of you can exploit his or her own work separately, although good luck to the drummer with that.

And finally, it is highly advisable to put all this together in a written band agreement which each of you signs. You can download free templates for these documents. That could prevent expensive disputes later when the royalties start rolling in. You haven't mentioned if or how you would like to exploit the song, but if it goes wider than something like Bandcamp or SoundCloud etc, you might want to consider getting a manager.