Biz Agreements

[acp4me]

Greetings to all!

I am seriously considering a collaboration venture on upcoming projects. What I'd like to know is what type of forms or agreements will I need from a business standpoint? Thanks for your help!!

[mazz]

I'm not an attorney, so this is just information from my own experience, and is not legal advice.

Publishers and libraries typically want music that they can license quickly and cleanly. Basically they want to go to one person (one stop) to negotiate the terms of the deal, even if there are co-writers involved. What this generally means is that you need an agreement with your co-writer(s) that gives you (or them or both) power of attorney to speak for the song or songs.

So if you submit a co-write to a TAXI listing under your name, the listing party will be contacting you if you get forwarded and they are interested in the piece. At that point, you'll need to be able to say yes or no to the terms without having to contact the co-writers. That's not to say that you couldn't, but you need to be prepared in case your co-writer is out of town, or otherwise unreachable. Oftentimes things are needed in a hurry and you may only have a matter of hours or less to decide and you don't want to be hunting down someone and lose the gig because you couldn't reach them in time to get their permission.

Also, if you have any session players, you need to have talent releases from them as well. This is also sometimes know as a work for hire agreement, and it basically releases the session players from any further participation in royalties above and beyond their session fee. Make sure you ask the players up front if they are comfortable signing one. Most libraries will want to see these before they'll sign a piece with session players on it. If they're union players under a union contract, there may be further encumbrances which might kill a deal so make sure you're clear on that as well if you use a union contract.

So just make sure you have everything in writing before you start your co-writes. There's several good books on the business aspects including ones by Passman, Brahaney, Blume and others.

Good luck!

Mazz

[Casey H]

Mazz offers good advice here. Just to add... (NOT! legal advice)

When a contract is offered, the signatures of all co-writers/co-master-owners are required. What your collaboration agreement can say (paraphrase, not legaleeze) is that you all agree that you have to jointly approve deals but if one of you can't be reached within a specified amount of time, another co-writer(s) has full power of attorney (POA) to execute contracts. It is very important that you specify that this POA applies to BOTH the composition and the master recording. I almost lost a deal because an agreement wasn't clear on the master recording part of it.

I've seen deals get blown because Person A co-writes with Person B and 7 years later Person A gets an offer but can't locate Person B.

Casey

[acp4me]

Thank you Mazz and Casey for the info! Your insight has given clarity on this topic for me!!

ACP