Owning your work

Build a catalogue. Keep as much of it as you can.

Everything else — touring, sync, streaming, showcases — is either a way of feeding the catalogue or a way of losing it. A catalogue is the only asset in a music career that grows in value while you sleep, and the only one that pays your family after you stop working.

Ownership is decided early, usually in a conversation nobody wrote down

Almost always in a room, on a day, before anyone thought it mattered. By the time it does matter, it is already settled. You can renegotiate a fee and you can leave a manager. You very rarely get a copyright back, and never cheaply.

Four assets people confuse for each other

THE SONG

composition and lyric. This is publishing, and it outlives you. THE RECORDING — the master; whoever paid for it usually owns it unless someone wrote down otherwise, and almost nobody writes it down. THE PERFORMANCE — neighbouring rights, paid in many countries and collected in almost none of them by accident; session players, this is your money. THE RELEASE — distribution and marketing, the easiest of the four to replace and the one everybody obsesses over.

The writer keeps the wealth

One of the most famous vocal performances ever recorded was of a song written by someone else. One of those two people made generational money from it, and it was not the voice you remember. That is not a story about fairness — it is a description of how the money is built.

The ownership ladder — what you can realistically keep

COMPOSITION

Best case: you and your co-writers own 100%, admin only. Normal: a publisher takes 25–50% for a term, then it reverts. Never: sign an open-ended option over everything you write in future.

MASTER

Best: you own it and licence it out. Normal: a label owns it, you have a royalty and an audit right. Never: let “whoever paid for the session” be decided later, verbally.

PERFORMANCE

Best: registered as a performer, collecting neighbouring rights. Normal: a session fee and nothing after. Never: play on a record with no credit and no paperwork.

YOUR NAME

Best: one consistent spelling everywhere, linked to your IPI. Normal: three spellings across four platforms. Never: assume the platforms will work it out. They will not.

The normal column is not failure — it is an ordinary deal. The last column is how careers quietly lose their second half.

What compounds, and what only feels urgent

What a decade actually looks like

YEARS 1–3

you are paying tuition. Say yes to almost everything, but register everything. The trap here is saying yes without paperwork; every unregistered session is money you will never see, and you will not remember the splits in ten years.

YEARS 4–7

you get known for one thing. Narrow on purpose. The trap is refusing to narrow because it feels like losing options. Nobody books “versatile”; they book a specific sound.

YEARS 8+

the stack pays. Old relationships return as work and the catalogue earns without you in the room. The trap is assuming the phone keeps ringing. It rings because you stayed reachable and easy, and both are choices you make weekly.

Every video below was checked against the channel that published it.

• Berne Convention (WIPO) The treaty that makes your work automatically protected in other countries.
• CISAC The global body of collecting societies. Useful for checking whether a society is real.
• Songtrust — publishing explained Plain-English explainers on what publishing actually is, and a paid admin service.