Songwriters and Master Royalties

On the evening of March 2nd 2024 when RAYE received her 3rd out of a record 6 total BRIT statuettes handed to her by BBC1’s Clara Amfo, she tagged her acceptance speech with the following plea:

?Please whilst I am here: British Record Music Industry, Please. I just want to have a lovely, brief conversation about normalizing giving songwriters master royalty points. It can be net-costs, okay? It doesn’t have to be at your expense, it just means that if the songs win big the writers get to win big too. Please allow that to happen!?

-RAYE, BRITS 2024

?Cameras panning to familiar faces in the crowd clapping and cheering -it was a moment that instantly connected with the audience at the UK’s biggest annual music industry award ceremony. The next day, clips of this exact soundbite went viral on many social media accounts. This? was not the first time we saw RAYE speak on this issue.?

A clip from the podcast +44 Podcast went viral in 2023 after RAYE broke down master royalties in a simplified, yet accurate equation, illustrating to the public that songwriters were completely eliminated from master royalty shares, and that they were also not compensated with any advance royalties, contrary to Producers of the same records, who usually landed an advance fee + 3-5 royalty points on master.

Who Else Is Speaking?

This conversation has been rumbling in the music industry for some time without any real initiatives put forth. Much of our industry is looking to major labels who hold the majority of marketshare, to enact any potential change but because the ask is aimed at the label share of royalties, this seems a tall ask against the corporations.

?In America, groups such as The100percenters and advocate and Grammy-winning songwriter Tiffany Red have long been on a mission to confront major labels about the lack of equity for writers. Conversations had on R&B Money Podcast, Ray Daniels, Muni Long on Breakfast Club quickly reveals a pattern.?

Who is suffering from this construct and who is speaking up? Especially Black women songwriters are leading the charge. Tired of seeing their contributions devalued contra the capital gain of the majors in the streaming era, while knowing that their IP and creative product is building America’s multibillion-dollar music industry, and personal fortunes for its top tier.

What is a songwriter?

Often we assume to know what songwriting entails but let’s review how songwriting can, and often does operate. Keep in mind there are a multitude of ways this operates but for the sake of this conversation, let’s make some healthy generalizations:

Breaking into the industry, songwriters have no clear roadmap and often choose to invest in extensive networking to get into positions where they are “in the room”. “The Room” means; the writing room, which is often a studio set-up where writers and producers collaborate to create songs for pitches or directly in collaboration with an artist. Writers often receive briefs and create the melody and lyrics on top of a beat/instrumentation provided by the producer. Writers often lay down the original vocals on a demo including background vocals. Sometimes these vocals remain on the track all the way to the final master. There are more than a few producers who also participate in the writing process and the A&R of the record itself. And as a rule, this position has first dibs on negotiations for the record and herein lies a hierarchy where the writers find themselves at the very bottom.

How to give songwriters master points : An indie perspective

Tapping into my personal experience as a manager and in the interest of illustrating how cutting in writers on master royalties could be possible, I want to tell you how we included a lead writer on a recent indie artist project. This was admittedly not an easy process and we had to navigate trying to really asses what could happen with the album relating to partnerships, and how additional royalties given would impact the artist who subsequently had to roll out the music for the following 18 months. We would need to develop creative visual assets, execute marketing, use artist labor and add team driving everything from PR to Radio. We also could not impede on the producer’s royalties. This project was electronic and therefor sonically driven. Production was a central element.?

In this situation we decided to expand the royalty share for collaborators from 4 to 6 points of the artist share, to make room for the writer on the record side. In this case, 6 points is quite a high share to part with. For context, it would amount to around 30% of the available shares if the project was released fully independently. To the layman this may not seem like a lot, but to those of us who deal with the back end, this is a big chunk to part with and informs the roadmap of the roll-out in a big way.

The main issue is that capital is the vehicle to grow any record and any outside investments will also require shares and recoupment structures. Writers and producers are traditionally not part of the promotion cycle of a record, and so their contributions always have to be calibrated to the growth of the record.

Though it took 6 months on the deal side, we came out of this process feeling accomplished and feeling like we had reached a 2.0 of our operations as an artist team. The artist was also able to consider how this informed the work structure moving into future projects. The focus for them becomes more structured rooms and transparent conversations around contributions. It also becomes paramount that writers and producers involve their teams, managers and publishers and allow everyone on the backend to connect and discuss the outcomes.

Now what?

How does this scale into the majors??

In the indie sphere, our greatest asset is our ability to constantly acquire experience and to share knowledge with our peers. This can inform us as we venture into partnerships with labels and in our contract negotiations. The big take-away that we need to keep at the forefront of our minds, is that there is certainly enough money in our industry to pay writer fees and for writers to share in master royalties. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Our current model is not finite and is determined by hierarchies and negotiation power. The more educated we are on alternative models of building an artist business, the more we can influence each other and re-author the space for ourselves. RAYE sits on the shoulders of countless songwriters who are speaking up for themselves right now and who know their worth. The pressure is building and we better tap in. Let’s talk about it!

Ljuba Castot is a Brooklyn-based independent artist manager and founder of Krtv Kulture.