For as long as you’ve known yourself music has all but consumed you. Sweet melodies always seem to be on replay in your mind and lyrics and poetry all but ooze through you. As a youngster you dreamt of the day you’d finally cut your first record and now that day has come. After years of dreaming, vying and longing you’ve finally been able to collaborate with a composer and studio engineer to complete and release your first song. You and your team of co-creators even sent in the new release to local radio stations, so now you’re brimming with pride having heard your song played for the first time on national radio.

While you’re new to the music scene, you have heard the term royalties, understanding that each time your song is aired by a licensed radio station royalties are due to the owners of the song. But what type of royalties are those and who gets what exactly? How do you decide on how those royalties will be shared? Is there a standard guideline or not?

Gosh it certainly can be daunting at first, so let’s get the basics down.

First off, it’s important to understand that there are different streams of music royalties. The stream of royalties earned when your song is played via radio are called performing rights royalties or performance rights royalties. Essentially, as the owner and creator of the musical work and therefore, a copyright holder you are entitled to performance rights royalties every time your musical work is performed publicly—such as via television, radio, the internet, or at live events. This public performance of the work could be live with singers and musicians playing the song, or could be the airing of the sound recording of the song.

Collective Management Organizations like the Eastern Caribbean Collective Organization for Music Rights (ECCO) serve as the middle agency collecting those royalties from music users (like radio stations and TV stations) and disbursing to the song’s copyright owners. A song’s copyright owners are the creators of the music work—lyric writer and composer/arranger—and the music publisher if the creators have entered into any music publishing agreements for that song where the rights to the song have been assigned to the publisher.  You can read more on music publishing HERE 

The specifics of how the royalties per song are split really boils down to the agreement made among the parties involved based on the contributions of each individual. As a means of limiting future conflict related to the work it is recommended that performance royalty splits be decided and agreed upon on before the song is publicly released. For ECCO members, once the share splits have been agreed, the necessary notification of work form should be completed and submitted to the organization.

In the absence of a specific notification or by notification of contractual agreements to the contrary the shares of a musical work are allocated as follows by ECCO:

• Original Unpublished Works

Composition with lyrics:

Composer(s)  50%

Lyricist(s)        50%

Composition without lyrics:

Composer(s) 100%

Public Domain composition with copyright lyrics

Lyricist(s)   100%

• Original Published Works

Composition with lyrics:

Composer(s) 25%

Lyricist(s)   25%

Publisher   50%

Composition without lyrics (or with public domain lyrics):

Composer(s) 50%

Publisher      50%

Public Domain composition with copyright lyrics

Lyricist(s)   50%

Publisher   50%

Composition with lyrics, composer share only published:

Composer(s) 25%

Lyricist(s)   50%

Publisher   25%

Composition with lyrics, lyricist share only published:

Composer(s) 50%

Lyricist(s)   25%

Publisher   25%

ECCO notes that contractual variations to the above rules are subject to the overriding rule that the share allocable to the writer or writers of a work shall not be less than 50%.