Co-writing splits: agree before, not after
Why a percentage agreed by word of mouth is the number one source of fights in the market, and what to do about it the week the song is born.
4 min read
A split is how the authorship of a work is divided among the people who wrote it. In Brazil it is declared on two separate axes, lyrics and music, and each axis has to add up to 100%.
In a writing session with three people, nobody talks percentages. Everyone leaves happy, someone drops the demo in the group chat and life goes on. The problem never shows up that day.
The problem shows up two years later
The song gets recorded, gets played, becomes a radio single, and then money arrives. At that moment, three people remember three different splits, and none of them is in writing. It isn’t dishonesty: it’s memory. Nobody wrote it down because writing it down felt like distrust.
From there, the only way out is to negotiate under pressure or go to court. Either way, the friendship is over.
What a well made split needs
- The name and CPF (Brazilian taxpayer ID) of each rights holder, not a nickname. “Junior on keys” doesn’t get paid by Ecad.
- Separate percentages for lyrics and music. It is common for someone who wrote only the lyrics to hold 50% of the lyrics and 0% of the music.
- The order of the credits. It looks like a detail and turns into an argument.
- Everyone’s signature. A split signed by only one person is an intention, not an agreement.
How Yawh handles it
The work stays in draft until the split adds up to 100% on both axes and every co-writer has signed. Only then can it be published, registered or licensed, and there is no path that skips this step.
A co-writer who doesn’t have an account yet gets a link and signs electronically, without filling out a full sign-up. That is where most platforms lose the user, so it is what we take the most care with.
Any later change doesn’t edit the previous agreement: it creates a new version, which everyone has to accept again. The whole history is kept.
And when the money arrives, each co-writer withdraws to their own account. Under no circumstances does the platform pay the full amount to one songwriter to pass on to the others, because that is exactly the mechanism behind most of the conflicts in the market today.