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It seems as though this is not a well understood issue from reading the comments here. This isn’t artists doing interviews and saying “I wrote this”. The proble

• aantix 6y ago
  This parallels my entire experience with comp-sci and "group" projects.
  • andrewzah 6y ago
    This is a large reason behind why I switched to programming after receiving a bachelors in media arts. I’ve had bad experiences with people claiming work they didn’t do, and getting away with it because they knew people. ...and programming pays better, anyhow.
  • TuringNYC 6y ago
    My favorite was in grad school -- six weeks into a final project, the professor emailed us "we noticed one of your assigned group member's name was missing from the project mid-term report". We were all like huh? What 5th group member? This person was assigned to our random group at week 0 and had never bother to even introduce himself in five weeks! Free rider galore.
    • tolbish 6y ago
      Well now I'm curious. How was the situation resolved?
      • TuringNYC 6y ago
        It was a 13 week class and the person minimally contributed by just showing up to meetings such that you couldn't say "he didn't show up." We had to do some D3js visualizations and one time he even sent a photo shreenshot of a chart rather than actual code to embed onto our project site. One time he gave us a hard time about not being able to meet at any point except his lunch-hour. So we're all on Eastern Time at 3pm during the workday and he's on zoom...eating a sandwich as we spoke. So we gave up, we didnt even include him on any conversations because it was negative value. In speaking with other students, 5-10% of the graduating class were complete free riders. Some were sponsored (e.g., federal government employees, etc) and were not only free-riders in terms of work, but also in terms of cost. Further, when graded your team got graded based on how many people you had, which many of us spoke up against especially given randomly assigned groups. That said, some of my randomly assigned teammates were awesome, we're still friends, we formed great bonds and I wouldnt want to miss that experience.
        • tolbish 6y ago
          All in all it sounds like the class adequately prepared you for the real world.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    One of the most fair way to handle group projects grading was in my capstone business management course. At the end, the 6 of us each had to (privately) rank everyone else according to their contribution, and the assessment by your peers was 20% of the grade for the project. Because someone had to come in last place, it eased a lot of the tension and created a much more pleasant group dynamic: - The free-rider(s) were perfectly okay with jumping on the grenade, filling the last-place spot, and knocking 20% off their final grade in exchange for doing very little work and still passing the class. - The lazier people who did care about their grade were a bit more motivated to contribute than they otherwise would've been. - The go-getters who wanted to ace the class felt like they were fairly compensated for doing most of the heavy lifting.
    • mettamage 6y ago
      I wonder how a group of pure go-getters would fare on a grade structure like this.
      • jdavis703 6y ago
        We had a fairly similar grading program in my IT capstone project. The professor made it clear that if a group had either a total grifter or was an all-star team exceptions could be made. We had to give lots of presentations and question and answer sessions. It was generally pretty clear to the entire class which students were slackers and couldn't answer questions and which ones knew their stuff.
• skeeter2020 6y ago
  >> If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting. What does "write the song" mean though? You hear lots of remix and cover versions of famous songs which are obviously derivative works, but what if that happens before the song is ever published? What if a song writer creates a song specifically for an artist? Do these stylistic influences count for writing credit? The line is not well defined.
  • antasvara 6y ago
    I think the line is pretty well defined. If a songwriter writes a song specifically for an artist, that doesn't indicate any less skill and definitely doesn't mean the artist added anything meaningful. That song could have just as easily (as in the Elvis example) been recorded by another artist. That's akin to saying that I took inspiration from the Harry Potter books, so I should give JK Rowling a cut of my book deal. As for remixes and covers, I'd say that if there was a change made that significantly altered or changed the song, it would be considered involvement. It seems that from the article, remixing or changing the song to the point where you would consider it substantially different is enough for a share of publishing revenues. Bottom line is that while it's still subjective, most musicians and songwriters would have no trouble recognizing if someone else had a substantial impact on the final product.
    • mc32 6y ago
      It’d be like movie producers taking a cut from film scores or songs because they influenced the score or music.
      • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        Or like Gene Roddenberry writing some cheap lyrics to the Star Trek theme so he'd get a 50% split of the publishing with composer Alexander Courage. The lyrics were never used. Because the lyrics were never supposed to be used.
    • emodendroket 6y ago
      In fact a number of hits were originally composed with a different artist in mind who declined.
• analog31 6y ago
  Indeed, and it goes back before Elvis. Screwing popular songwriters of their royalties has been a fixture of the music business since time immoral. From what I've read, Jelly Roll Morton's publisher added his own lyrics to Morton's instrumental tunes, to get a cut of the royalties. And it goes back before the recording industry. Before the phonograph, the "music business" was sheet music, there were "stars," and sheet music composers experienced all of the shenanigans that we associate with the music business today.
  • oytis 6y ago
    > since time immoral I like this typo.
    • lostlogin 6y ago
      Me too - but what would it mean? A long time or a short time?
      • beambot 6y ago
        Time immemorial: "extending beyond the reach of memory, record, or tradition, indefinitely ancient, ancient beyond memory or record." Immoral: "an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong."
      • nyczomg 6y ago
        I assume it means a time length for as long as the times have been immoral.... So perhaps it means since the dawn of mankind?
      • ggm 6y ago
        "You can leave your hat on" "You don't have to put out the red light"
    • globular-toast 6y ago
      Freudian slip maybe.
  • 6y ago
• iams 6y ago
  It's not like 10% of sales goes to the song writer, so the artist changing a word means that the artist gets and additional 1% and the song writer only 9%. Surely at the point of producing a contract everyone negotiates the split and signs the contract if they are happy with the deal.
  • MisterBastahrd 6y ago
    Few people are ever happy with a contract. That's why it's a contract in the first place. If everyone were happy, there'd be no need to make breaking the terms of one actionable.
  • S_A_P 6y ago
    Think of it as separate pies. Album sales will be split into at least 3 pieces. Album sales are the first pie. Firstly the label will have to recoup cost of production, sample clearance, video production etc to recoup. The producers and songwriters will likely get paid here as well, but the artist will get paid only after it recoups. Fuzzy math comes into play here and 10 million selling albums may never recoup... Next there is the mechanical royalties that come from radio play, streaming, licensing agreements, etc. Those largely go to the owner of the composition(e.g. songwriter) from 25% up to 90ish percent depending on the publishing deal. The live performance aspect is where the artist can rake it in if they play things smart. The live show largely goes to the artist(*as long as there is not a 360 deal in place*) They can charge what they can get, and sell merch at the show. If they produce their own merch they can probably net a nice profit. If they let a merch company "handle it for them" they will see 10 cents on the dollar or less. Artists can get into trouble if they make their shows too big and would only break even/run at a loss. 360 deals are a particularly insidious anti artist beast. Basically the label throws their might behind the artist and gets a large cut of ALL aspects of the money they make being an artist.(live shows,merch, everything) I suspect many of the big names at least start out in a 360 deal these days, and may have negotiating power once they become Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Ariana Grande. Songwriters probably have the least negotiating power in this situation. When an artist has 50 songwriting teams throwing tracks their way, a suboptimal deal may have to be accepted just to have a shot at making the album. While I am not saying songwriting is not a talent(it most certainly is), unfortunately more people have said talent than there are A-List stars.
• rob74 6y ago
  However I think being able to say "I (co-)wrote this" also plays a part - especially in Elvis' time, actual singer-songwriters were probably held in greater esteem than artists that were just "parroting" songs others wrote for them, so giving the impression that they were involved in writing the songs may have been important from that perspective too...
• dehrmann 6y ago
  I always thought the artists make token edits to the songs so they can keep up the charade of writing their own songs for marketing reasons. Someone told me "Taylor Swift writes her own songs." Sure, but when you look at the songwriters on 1989, over half of them were at least co-written by the song writer with the most #1 hits after McCartney and Lennon.
  • emodendroket 6y ago
    I looked this up and while some of her older hits were just credited to her, a really impressive number of them were co-written by Liz Rose, who I’ve never even heard of.
    • spoonjim 6y ago
      Could it be a pseudonym for someone whose image would suffer if they were seen to be writing Taylor Swift songs?
      • apetresc 6y ago
        No... just Google "Liz Rose"
      • emodendroket 6y ago
        No, she’s a very successful country songwriter. Can’t see why she wouldn’t want the association.
        • spoonjim 6y ago
          What if it’s someone like Eminem?
          • emodendroket 6y ago
            Well you can search for her on Google and find her photo and tons of personal details. So I consider that unlikely.
• samfisher83 6y ago
  If Rihanna sings your song it might have a much greater chance of being a hit.10% of a million dollars is better than 100% of 10000 dollars. You just have to do the math and figure if its worth it or not.
  • strunz 6y ago
    Yes, this is well covered in the article.