Copyright on a Record

The flow diagram at the bottom of this page, demonstrates what incomes are generated from both the sale and airplay of a record.

You will note that we have distinguished between the songwriter (melody, lyrics) and the artist (guitar, bass, singer etc.). It may well be that the songwriter also happens to be one of the artists, but for royalty entitlement purposes, you do need to adopt a split personality (in most cases, not all musicians song write).

Though we are NOT going to go too deep into copyright issues here, this diagram does shows who is entitled to what percentage split of the incomes generated.

To give you an idea of the money involved, say an album has a "dealer price" (what the shops buy it for) of £7.99, the Songwriter is entitled to 8.5% of the £7.99 for every record sold (often on all records manufactured regardless of whether they sell or not). This "mechanical" royalty therefore is worth around £0.68 per record or £680 per thousand (the MCPS will take off an admin charge).

Artists are NOT entitled to this income unless another side of their personality happens to be the songwriter (or the songwriter has given part of their entitlement [or cash] to another performer - That's it! No more copyright ownership bits for now!).

The artist does earn a royalty from every record sold however - the "artists royalties". If we say the artist has negotiated a 10% royalty on the record "dealer price", they would be entitled to around £0.80 per record sold (or £800 per thousand).

Therefore, if there were four (4) artists in the band and only one (1) songwriter, each artist would be entitled to £200 "artist royalties" per thousand sales from their record company, whilst the songwriter would also receive an additional £680 (total of £880) from the MCPS (if they have a publishing deal however, they would get a percentage of the "mechanicals" via their publisher depending on the deal agreed).

Similarly, a 3 minute airplay on BBC Radio One will generate around £40 for the songwriter (after PRS admin charges), income which again the artist is NOT entitled to. Their bit comes via PPL though we are unsure how much is collect for both the artist / record company for the same airplay (if you know, please let us know!).

It may all be maths to you, but this is how people eat! Music is, after all, a business like any other!

The most important thing to remember from this illustration is that UNLESS you join the MCPS and PRS or have a publishing deal (for songwriters), and PAMRA, AURA or you "register" with PPL (for artists), though your copyright or performance may have generated income, you will NOT receive a penny!

We hope this makes sense, but if it still means nothing to you, you can always register to receive details of our courses running in your area!

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