My tendency, rather than looking at this as a division into writer and
singer, is to first look at it as a division of song and recording. If the
song is self-published, and is also not co-written, then there is no further
subdividing of that, and all of that portion (however it is sized) would go
to the writer. However, the recording, unless all made by one person who
does everything, is likely to get subdivided, for example, into singer,
musicians, producer, engineer, arranger, mixer, and whatever else may be
involved. The other thing here is who is doing the administration and any
promotion/marketing of the recording. So that could be another cut of the
recording part of it (assumedly any song-specific promotion outside of the
recording would be the responsibility of the publisher, but the publisher
might also be involved in promoting the recording, especially if that is the
only released version of the song).

I think the model would probably need to vary depending on circumstances,
and my tendency is to look at it more or less like a record
company/publisher relationship (i.e. in the sense of the traditional music
industry) even if the same person is filling multiple roles on both sides of
the fence.

Purely for recording sales, there are some legal guidelines -- i.e. the
statutory mechanical royalty rate, which can be applied to most download
sales (questionable would be when the download price gets very close to, or
less than, the statutory rate, but, thus far, I don't think there are many
services that get down quite that far for permanent downloads). Down the
line somewhere, there probably also will be for interactive streams and
temporary/tethered downloads, but last I heard it was expected to be at
least September before a final verdict would be rendered on that. TBD
information notwithstanding, though, this tends to lead me to think the song
portion of the money should be structured based on the legal guidelines, and
would probably come off the top, be it as a penny rate (e.g. the current 9.1
cents per song) or a percentage of wholesale rate (e.g. if the new rates end
up going that route, or to cover situations where the wholesale price of the
download gets too low to make the statutory rate reasonable).

Then, whatever is left over from that is for the recording, but that could
also include marketing and administration functions, especially if we're
talking about project with enough players to make it not a simple case of
self promotion and paying oneself. My next tendency in this would be to
figure out what any marketing and administration cuts should be, based on
what is planned in these areas, then take that, probably as a percentage,
off the top of what is left after the song portion. For example, if there
isn't going to be any promotion budget, and all people involved in the
recording are expected to promote it to the best of their abilities, but
there are enough people involved to make admin (e.g. tracking the royalties,
dividing them up, issuing payments, etc.) non-trivial, perhaps assigning 10%%
for admin might make sense. It's hard to say what might be fair here, but
there definitely could be considerable work in dealing with this sort of
stuff.

Anyway, once you get any marketing an admin portions handled, then it comes
down to what is left for the creative side of the recording, and all the
players involved in that. Here again, I think it all depends on the nature
of the project. Will it be going out under the singer's name, for example?
Or will it be something like "the Songwriter A project" where the singer is
just the voice, not the identity of the artist? If the song will be
associated with the singer's name (i.e. the singer is a "featured artist"),
my inclination would be to split the recording 50/50 between singer and "the
rest" (i.e. producer, musicians, etc.), then take "the rest" (i.e. those who
were involved in the tracks and production, and figure out how best to
allocate that (assuming everyone is collaborating on spec, not doing "work
for hire" that would not be based on royalties). On the other hand, there
is often a lot more work on the production side than in the vocals, so it's
easy to make the case that the singer should get a smaller percentage --
e.g. maybe 25%% -- especially if there is a complex arrangement. It really
all depends on the project, and probably also on the leverage of the
individuals involved.

This is a real-time consideration for me as I have an upcoming release that
has multiple songwriters (two co-written songs with different co-writers),
multiple featured vocalists (the recordings are duets), and different casts
of characters involved in the instrumental tracks for each of the songs on
the release. Even within this one release, which is likely to have a total
of 5 tracks, including the main two songs and three remixes of those, it is
tough to come up with a one-size-fits-all model that seems fair all around.

Rick
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Rick Paul
Closet Cowboy Music (ASCAP)
Web: www.RickPaul.info
MySpace: www.myspace.com/rickpaulmusic
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