a (dumb) question about songwriting credits

that's the organizing principle of bands like u2 and rem, which automatically credit all songs to "bono/edge/clayton/mullins" and "berry/buck/mills/stipe," even though only one or two guys are generally responsible for the "words" and "chords."

a lot of other songwriters and bands obviously disagree with that approach.

as dleone says, it's completely up to the band.

the blasters, i remember being told, split all of their songwriting income equally across the band, even though virtually all of their songs were credited solely to dave alvin. that always sounded like an interesting solution to me.

I'm not sure about the legal standing of it all, though. It seems to me that bands make a number of compromises about how they'd like to distribute songwriting credits -- in essense, negotiating who'll have to get what in order for the whole thing to work -- but there are plenty of cases of people later claiming that regardless of the assigned credit, they were responsible for writing a key portion of a song. And in a lot of cases, suits like that have been successful, so long as there's some on-the-ground evidence to support the claim. I think there might be a bit of friction between the legal standard of who actually contributed to a song and the slightly more fudgy assignment of credits as commodities.

(But umm yeah, it seems the legal standard for "songwriting" has mainly to do with chord structure and key melodies, beyond which it becomes "arrangement" -- in other words, everything that would appear on a simplified piano-vocal score constitutes the "song.")

and what makes all of this possible, besides the hunger for the lifetime annunities that a hit song can bring, is the simple fact that the songwriting process is so fuzzy and mysterious that a lot of songwriters couldn't even tell you themselves if they "wrote" a certain song or not.

but i'm not sure things have changed since the beginning of rock in any substantial way. buying, selling and bartering always has been, and probably always will be, part of the songwriting game.

It's sort of cute, actually -- how "songwriting" credits have little to do with songwriting and are basically divided around a band as commodities and negotiable goods. I actually think the character of rock has changed a little bit due to new organizations of this

...and was, in the end, just trying to argue that i don't think the character or rock has changed at all due to changes in any of this.

that's all.

Can you divide credits into percentages? Like, Lennon (75%) and McCartney (25%)?

Bear in mind that the bulk of current copyright law dates from a time before the popularisation of recorded music. For much of history, songwriting was a case of writing lyrics and a tune which would be published as sheet music and performed by any host of people that the songwriter(s) would never meet.

Copyright in this case is cut and dried - money derived from the song consists of royalties from selling the printed music, so the only people that get a share of the money are the person(s) who wrote the lyrics and the tune printed on the paper. If some creative musician in a saloon in the East End adds a bassline, it's nothing to do with the publishing.

Obviously, it's a totally different world when you're dealing with a song as a concept of an entirely arranged entity recorded with orchestration in place.

Different bands "play" the percentages in different ways based on the contributions of the band members, but it's fairly standard these days that if you hog the songwriting credit (and therefore publishing money) amoung the person(s) that wrote the words and melody, then you are going to get yer ass sued, Smiths-style.

I would advise that any and all bands agree what the splits should be BEFORE there is any money involved.

(This can be very irritating when you have written a song entirely yourself, words, melody, arranged it, handed the parts to your bandmates on sheet music, spent the entire time in the studio arranging the song WITH NO HELP from your bandmates, and then they still all turn up at the end of the day when you've sold the song to the movies and insist on getting their 15% or whatever... but hey, it avoids arguments and hard feelings.)

eg he ochestrated "kashmir" but got no credit for it, although bonham did, having provided the rhythm in the original jam that yielded the song, so they let jones have main songwriting credits for this other song called "trampled underfoot", which becomes the collectors item, being the single from that respective album from this "albums band"

eg jones got listed first in all the 'in through the out door' tracks because page was supposedly too strung out during those sessions to have been able to have many ideas

yet jones still makes jibes about un-fair distribution of royalties as recently as a couple of years ago, and it seems jones and plant still cannot be in the same room together, i suppose because plant get's credits for making this "oohh, aahhh, triiirrr, .. " type set of animal noises on most of their songs

when it's a band like led zep with millions of dollars being divided three ways instead of five ways i'd like to have been a fly on the wall when their boss peter grant decided who was getting royalties on such'n'such and who wasn't
(presumably one of the times that Grant's professional wrestling skills would have come in handy -- anyone read the recent bio of Grant ?? is it worth it ? )

I've asked for the whole of my track, 50/50 on the new tracks old ideas ones and nothing on the others. I'm getting dosh on the performance side of things(I made sure I made a sound on every track somewhere) and 2 points anyway, so I'm happy.