My friend Daniel Johansson who is a researcher on the music industry wrote something quite interesting on his facebook today:

Drake’s “Nice For What” has 21 songwriters, “In My Feelings” has 16. The average amount of songwriters on top 25 songs in the US 2018 was 6.5. The only song that has an alone composer is Ed Sheeran with “Perfect”. Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” has 30 registered songwriters (all are listed under Credits on Spotify).

In the discussion, it all comes up that of course many of the people that take part in the rights is also managers, labels and stuff. And it’s not that new, I remember when the industry look that it was 15 writers on a Beyonce song.

Of course, it doesn’t say how much each person has, it can be as low as 0,5 % in a song. And it can be 29 persons having 1% each and the last person has 70%.
Still, it’s kind of normal in the bigger industry that this happens.

But it’s here I get in trouble. For me, it’s pretty clear and understand it. Over the years I have done some pretty good changes out from the ordinary things around contracts. The åprobelm I usually have is old people that teach at schools and government institutions.

If I gave an artist a deal where I should have split parts in the song as manager and they showed that contract to their teacher, the teacher would go ballistic. A big problem that we have right now is that many people that teach in the schools and in the institutions really don’t have a knowledge of what is going on. Their knowledge is from mainly the 80:s and the 90:s then they were laid off in 2000 and are still counting that the industry works the same.

I bump into this quite often that artists go to some old person they trust and get information that is totally wrong about what it really looks like. Or start going to a school and mix all things up in their head and make a mess of their whole career.

The fact is there are no standard things any longer. You have to go on your sense what is right or what is wrong. If you give out songs on a label that only works in the Nordic why should you give away the rights for the world?
At the same time why hold a label back with just the Nordics if they are putting money into PR around the globe?

Everything has to be discussed case for case.

Also, check where the knowledge comes from. If a person goes on 20 international fairs around the globe and you still think a producer that still are in school and never visited any industry events, knows more. I guess you deserve to have your career dropped.

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