Imagine you recorded a song a year ago with a friend in a borrowed room in Medellín. She wrote the lyrics, you built the melody, and another friend made the beat. You put it out on a Friday, it got a few plays, and everyone went back to their lives. Nobody signed anything, because nobody expected anything.
Now a video with your song in the background starts to circulate, and the numbers climb every day. The first thing that arrives isn't money. It's the question of who wrote what.
The short answer: sign the split while the song is still worth nothing. If it has already started to move, sign today, before the first big payment. For that, Musilock has a short split sheet, in Spanish and English, that goes out for e-signature.
A song can take off months or years after release
The podcast El arte del negocio musical recently looked at three albums that had their best moment long after release. A pop album entered the charts quietly and hit its peak position about eight months later. The reason: a song by the same artist, around nine years old, went viral on TikTok and pulled the rest of the catalog along with it.
Another song racked up more than 160 million streams in under two months, about a year after release, once it appeared in a Spider-Man movie. A third debut grew a year after it came out, helped along by concerts and interviews.
These are big artists, but the same mechanism applies to you. Your song stays available forever and has no expiration date. About 150,000 new songs reach the platforms every day, according to Luminate figures cited in the episode. Nobody can predict which one will find its audience, or when.
That doesn't mean every song takes off if you wait long enough. Many never do. That's why you can't know which one to sign first: you have to sign them all.
Fights over percentages start when the money arrives
Nobody argues over a song that earns nothing. Once it starts earning, memory shifts. Each co-writer remembers their own contribution as a little bigger than everyone else's, and they do it in good faith.
Without a written agreement, what happens depends on your country. In some places, all co-writers are presumed to hold equal shares, even if one of them did most of the work. Find out how it works where you live.
There is a practical problem too. To get paid, the song is registered with your collecting society and your distributor, with a percentage for each writer. If two people register different numbers, payments are usually held until it's sorted out.
Then there are the opportunities. When a film production company, a brand or a bigger artist wants to use or remix your song, the first thing they ask is who controls it. If a co-writer doesn't reply or doesn't agree, the deal goes cold. Those windows last a few weeks, and they won't wait for you to reach an agreement.
A short, signed split covers the essentials
You don't need ten pages. You need what everyone remembers today written down, with a date and signatures. The minimum:
- The song title and the approximate date it was made.
- The legal name and the artist name of everyone who took part.
- Each person's percentage of the composition (lyrics and melody), adding up to 100.
- Each person's percentage of the recording, if it differs from the composition.
- Everyone's signature and the date.
The percentages don't have to be equal. The people who took part decide them: who wrote, who produced, who came up with the melody. What matters is that everyone accepts them in writing while the track is still just a song.
If it's already out without a split, sign before the first big payment
A split sheet signed months later carries less weight than one signed during the session, because you have to reconstruct what happened. Even so, it's worth far more than having nothing. And every week with money coming in makes the conversation harder.
Write to each co-writer today, while the relationship is good. Propose a split based on what each person did. Go through the project files, the chats and the voice notes from the session: they carry dates and help you remember who contributed what. If someone disagrees, it's better to find out today than after the first payment.
Having the paperwork ready is part of reacting in time
The episode stresses that promotion doesn't end on release day, and that it pays to save resources to push the song that starts to grow. Paperwork works the same way. A song that's moving brings fast offers: a remix, a video, a film license.
With a signed split sheet, you can say yes within a day, because you already know who decides and what share each person gets. That's what Musilock is for: it generates the sheet in Spanish and English and sends it out for e-signature, with no need to get everyone into the same city.
Nobody knows which of your songs will take off. What you can make sure of is that when one does, everyone already knows their share.