Split sheet

A split sheet records the ownership of a composition: every writer, the percentage each holds, their publisher if they have one, and their IPI. It is signed by everyone who contributed. That is all it is, and it prevents more disputes than any other document in music.

Its value comes from the default rule it displaces. Where two or more people contribute copyrightable material intending it to merge into a single work, US law treats the result as a joint work, and absent an agreement the co-owners hold undivided interests — commonly assumed equal — with each able to grant non-exclusive licences while accounting to the others. A room of four people in which one wrote the entire topline arrives at a legal answer nobody in it intended. A split sheet is the agreement that displaces the default.

A usable sheet carries the song title and any alternate titles, the date and place, every contributor's legal name alongside any professional name, each writer's percentage summing to one hundred, each writer's society affiliation and IPI, the publisher and its IPI where one exists, and signatures. Producers who contributed compositional material belong on it. Session players performing someone else's part generally do not, and are handled by a separate release covering the recording side.

The document is not itself a copyright registration and does not by itself move ownership. It is evidence of what was agreed, and it becomes the input to registering the work with the relevant bodies. Without a registration matching the sheet, the money still has nowhere to go — unmatched income sits undistributed rather than defaulting to anyone.

The practical rule is that a split sheet signed the day of the session is worth more than a perfect one negotiated two years later, when the song is earning and the incentives have changed.