The Wailers' bass player, Aston Barrett, has lost his high court bid for a £60m slice of Bob Marley's royalties. Barrett, nicknamed Family Man, is now superbly placed to write a song called 52 Kids and Not Enough Cash. But the case makes you wonder: how do bands split their royalties?
With difficulty. Songwriting royalties, not to be confused with recording royalties, come in four varieties - mechanical (eg CD sales); performing (radio airplay); synchronisation (film soundtracks); and print (sheet music). Tot them all up, deduct the publisher's cut (often 50%), and you have a tidy sum - up to $5m for a hit. "We always call the songwriting royalty the pension," says Ann Harrison, a legal consultant and author of Music: The Business (Virgin, 2005). "If you write a song that's recorded umpteen times, the income will last your lifetime plus copyright, which is 70 years."
But if the songs take shape in the studio, over late nights and conceivably the odd spliff, how do you decide who has written what?
Among the members of Coldplay royalties are evenly split. Chris Martin writes the songs and shoulders the fame, but shares all royalties with his three mates from uni, who get the best of both worlds - virtual anonymity accompanied by large cheques. This approach differs slightly from that of U2 who have an even split on the tunes only ("music by U2, words by Bono"). Everybody wins. Bono gets more money to trot the globe on behalf of good causes; Larry Mullen, the magnificently taciturn drummer, gets none of the blame for any views expressed.
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