Dividing The Pie – Love and Money in Creative Partnerships

A couple posts ago, dumbdrummer explored what I call the “invisible thread,” a mysterious vitality that unites the members of a great musical group, making the collaboration artistically compelling. You can hear this special connection in the group’s recordings and live performances. Sometimes you can see its aura in photos. The origins of this bond are allusive; a band’s brilliance can’t be accounted for among the specific talents of the individual members. Rather, it’s found in the interplay between the members’ unique personalities, artistic sensibilities, and performance styles. In a great group, there are no unimportant contributors – every musician plays a key role in creating and sustaining the unusual thing that makes the band special.

 

Unfortunately, great groups are often ticking time bombs. The same tensions that combine to create a unique and exciting creative partnership also threaten to tear it apart. Bands go a long way toward curtailing the destructive potential of personal and creative differences by practicing some tried and true techniques for maintaining healthy working relationships. Maintaining open, honest and compassionate communication between members is critical, as is establishing an environment of mutual respect.

 

But in addition to effectively managing its personal and creative differences, a great band must also be smart about the way it conducts its internal business.  In particular, it must understand the impact that money, and how it’ distributed, has on members’ commitment to the common cause and, therefore, on the group’s ability to realize its artistic and commercial potential.

 

What’s true for great bands is true for great creative partnerships of all kinds, whether it’s a team of auto designers, video game creators, or advertising creatives – if a collaboration is special, its members must be wise about how they share the wealth and recognition generated by that collaboration, or risk losing it altogether. 

 

Following The Money

 

Bands get paid through many potential revenue streams. Some of these – including selling records and licensing masters for use in TV and film – are generated by means of selling a group’s recordings.  Many more streams are generated by the group’s intellectual property – its songs – in the form of publishing royalties. These include mechanical royalties, sync royalties, broadcast royalties (BMI, ASCAP), and print royalties.  Still other revenue streams include merchandise sales (t-shirts, etc.) and live performance fees.

 

While there are many ways for a group to earn money, traditionally income is not distributed evenly among members.  According to convention, members do share equally in the revenue earned from selling and licensing its recordings, as well as the revenue from merchandise sales and performance fees. Publishing money, however, is treated differently – it’s paid only to the band’s songwriters.

 

The unique financial status of a group’s songwriter is rooted in the history of the music industry. Prior to the 1960’s, professional songwriters rarely recorded the songs they wrote, and performers rarely wrote the songs they recorded. Record companies signed entertainers, and then hired tunesmiths to give the entertainers something to sing. Songwriting and performing were two distinct businesses, each with their own unions and systems of payment.

 

Then, with the advent of rock and roll, a performer’s personal artistic vision became valued above everything else. Rock was the music of rebellion and individual identity.  No singer wanted to be seen as puppet or a fake, and so more and more songwriters became performers, and more and more performers became songwriters.

 

But even as the worlds of performers and songwriters merged, their respective economics didn’t. In bands, only the songwriters signed the publishing agreement, so only the songwriters collected the publishing checks.

 

If songwriting weren’t a lucrative revenue stream for a successful group, the small income discrepancy resulting from an uneven distribution of publishing money wouldn’t be a big deal. But songwriting is potentially extremely lucrative. In fact, publishing is often the richest result of a band’s growing popularity. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of the resulting financial hierarchy that existed between writers and non-writers, groups continued to accept the old tradition that songwriters should be paid more than their band mates.

 

One for you, two for me

 

But while band members didn’t fight the idea that writers deserved unique treatment, they did fight ferociously to get their own songs on their band’s records. It’s well known, for example, that George Harrison long-resented John and Paul’s near songwriting monopoly in the Beatles, and that rift is in no small part responsible for the group’s 1971 split.

 

The Beatles songwriting turf war is just one of countless publishing battles that contributed to a band’s premature death.  The vast majority of these break-ups involved anonymous bands with great potential. Many, though, were high profile acts whose well-publicized splits served as lessons for young musicians. Bands slowly got the message that financial inequity can destabilize a creative partnership, and by the 1980’s future super-groups like U2 and R.E.M. were making music industry history by dividing songwriting income equally among all members – even when only one or two were actually writing songs in the traditional sense.

 

All for one…

 

Why in the world would a songwriter choose to share such a potentially profitable source of income with his non-songwriter collaborators? As it turns out, there are many good reasons why he might. These reasons are informed by understanding the psychological power of money, and are aimed at securing the long-term stability of the group.

 

Quality Control

Dividing publishing equally among members can act as a sort of quality control mechanism on the group’s music. The traditional economics of publishing gives a writer a higher status in a group, and awards her more money for every song her group records.  When this special economic status is removed, a songwriter is more likely to advocate for the group’s best songs no matter who wrote them, not just for her own.

 

Group Effort

While the music industry created a framework for rewarding a group’s songwriters, it failed to come up with one for rewarding the members who booked all the gigs, hung all the posters, designed the t-shirts, got all the press, engineered the group’s record, built the website, and scored a great deal on a van. Dividing publishing equally serves as recognition that it takes more than great songwriting to make a band successful, and validates every member’s important contribution to the common good.

 

Shared Sacrifice

Third, since publishing revenue increases the more a group tours in support of their records, sharing publishing money acknowledges that a song’s success is often proportionate to a band’s collective personal sacrifice.

 

Every Penny Counts

Even when a band is signed to a supportive label, it’s often financially difficult for members to immediately leave their day jobs and to give their group the attention it needs to reach the next level. Until a group is well established, every penny counts.  For many bands, a publishing advance, evenly distributed, has served as the critical bridge between poverty and sustainability.

 

What’s a song after all?

Traditionally, a song is defined as a melody, a chord progression, and a lyric.  These days, however, a smash hit may consist solely of a drum rhythm and a rap – just ask my buddies, The Neptunes.  Or a keyboardist’s distinctive synthesizer line might serve as a song’s crucial hook.  When instrumental elements serve a fundamental purpose in a song’s construction, the musician’s role ascends from mere arranger to that of songwriter.  More and more, groups are acknowledging this trend by sharing both songwriting credit and the publishing bounty equally among its members.

 

Preserving the invisible thread

 

Not every performing songwriter wants to be part of a real band. Backed by a revolving door of hired guns, solo artists have nothing to lose by keeping every penny of their publishing earnings. However, those songwriters who choose to showcase their tunes within the context of a true creative partnership are wise to consider the potential benefits of sharing publishing revenue with their partners. Indeed, if what I suggested in last month’s article is true – that in a great group, every member plays a part in creating and maintaining the je ne sais quoi that makes the band special – then a group’s decision about how it divides its financial pie may be the most important it will ever make.