Composition

The composition is the work that exists before anyone records it: the melody, the harmony and the lyrics. US law protects it as a musical work under section 102, independently of any particular recording. Record the same song three times and you create three masters and one composition.

Copyright in a composition arises automatically the moment it is fixed in a tangible form — written down, or captured on a voice memo. Registration with the Copyright Office is not what creates the right, though in the US it is a precondition for bringing an infringement suit and for certain remedies, which is why it is still worth doing.

Compositions are almost always co-owned. Where two or more people contribute copyrightable material intending it to merge into one work, the result is a joint work, and absent an agreement each co-owner holds an undivided interest in the whole and can licence it non-exclusively while accounting to the others. That default rarely matches what the room intended, which is the entire reason a split sheet exists: it records who wrote what percentage, before anyone's memory becomes the evidence.

Income on the composition side arrives in two main forms. Mechanical royalties pay for reproduction — physical copies, downloads and the copy element of an on-demand stream. Performance royalties pay for public performance, and are conventionally split into a writer's share and a publisher's share that are paid separately.

A composition is identified internationally by an ISWC, and each interested party — writer or publisher — by an IPI. Those two codes, plus a registration lodged with the right bodies, are what make income findable. An unregistered song still earns; it just does not necessarily reach anybody.