Split sheets, completely

38 · 2026-09-05 · 13 min read · Español

A split sheet is a written record, signed by everyone who wrote a song, of what share of that song each writer owns. It does not create those shares and it does not file them anywhere. Copyright arrives when the song does; money arrives when somebody types the numbers into every society that pays. The sheet is what makes those two things agree, which puts it in the middle of the job rather than at the end of it.

• A split sheet is a written record, signed by every writer, of what share of one song each of them owns. It covers the song, not the recording.
• A split sheet records shares rather than creating them. US copyright vests in the authors at creation, and joint authors are co-owners by default.
• Any song with more than one author needs one. Who counts as an author is decided by what a person contributed, not by who was in the room.
• Signing a split sheet does not file it anywhere. The shares are entered by the writers themselves at each society, and the sheet stays with the writers.
• The cost of settling a split rises at each stage: a new sheet before anything is filed, a procedure at every society afterwards, and no reach at all over licences already granted.

What is a split sheet?

A split sheet is a written record, signed by everyone who wrote a song, of what share of that song each writer owns.

That is the whole definition, and almost everything written about split sheets goes wrong in the next sentence, so here are the two things it is not.

It is not where the shares come from. The US Copyright Office is unusually plain about this: your work is “under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form,” and “in general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created.” Section 201(a) then vests that copyright in the author or authors and makes the authors of a joint work co-owners of it. Nothing about who owns the song is waiting on your paperwork. The law already divided it, on a rule nobody in the room chose, and the sheet replaces that rule with what you actually agreed.

It is not a filing. No society issues a split sheet, no society receives one, and nothing you sign in a room reaches a database by itself. What the sheet does and does not reach is its own subject, and the short version is that the registers read what you typed into them.

So the document is evidence. It exists to prove what four people agreed, to the two audiences who will ever ask — the societies that pay, and whoever turns up years later disagreeing. Everything below is the order those two audiences arrive in.

Which of your songs actually need one?

Any song with more than one author needs a split sheet, and authorship turns on what a person contributed rather than what they were called.

The statutory test is in section 101: a joint work is “a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.” Two authors, one song, contributions that cannot be pulled apart afterwards. That is it.

Which sounds like it settles the question and does not, because the arguments never happen at the edges. They happen here:

• The band that “splits everything equally.” A band splits recordings, merchandise and touring however it likes. The song is a separate copyright with separate authors, and no band arrangement has ever been read out loud at a PRO.
• The topline written over somebody else’s instrumental. Two people, working weeks apart, who may never have spoken. Still one song.
• The person who sang the harmony, re-wrote the second verse, or told you the bridge was wrong. One of those three is probably an author and two probably are not, and which is which is the hardest question in this cluster. It has its own page because it deserves one.
• The producer. A producer can be owed twice, from two copyrights, under two agreements — a writer share of the song if they wrote, and points on the recording for producing. Writing one number on the split sheet and considering it handled is the most common mistake on this list.

One more, because it arrives already half-decided. If you licensed the beat, the licence may already state a writer split. Read it before you write a different number on anything.

When do you write it, and what does waiting cost?

Write the split sheet at the session: the same disagreement costs a new sheet before anything is filed and a procedure at every society afterwards.

Everyone tells you to do it early. Almost nobody tells you why, so the advice sounds like tidiness, and tidiness loses to a mix every single time. It is not tidiness. It is that the price is set by which of three stages you are standing in when somebody finally asks.

Before anything is filed. Nothing has left the room. A disagreement costs a conversation and a fresh piece of paper, and it costs that whether you have it today or in six weeks.

After the numbers are registered. Three or four organisations now hold a version of the answer, and changing a filed split is a procedure with an order to it — a new agreement first, then every register that carries the old numbers, each in its own way and on its own timetable. Nothing about it is hard. It is simply no longer free, and it is no longer yours alone to do.

The moment the first registration is filed, the split stops being a private agreement and becomes a record several organisations hold. The Rubicon, in this business, is a Submit button.

After a licence has been granted. A later agreement between the writers moves the shares going forward. It does not reach backwards into a licence somebody has already granted against the old ones — in the United States a co-owner can license the whole song non-exclusively without asking, and what they granted stays granted.

Five minutes, at the end of the session, while everybody is still pleased with the thing they just made. That is the entire cost of never meeting stages two and three.

What goes on it, and who decides the numbers?

A split sheet has to name the song, name every writer with their share, carry the date, and be signed by all of them.

Those four are the requirements. Everything else on the page is convention rather than law, which is why the arguments about a split sheet are almost never arguments about its fields.

The conventions still matter, and our template walks every one of them — legal name against professional name, the IPI number and where to get it, the ISWC line, the 100% and 200% conventions. It is free, it is not gated, and it is the page to have open at the session rather than this one.

The numbers themselves are yours to decide. The law’s default is equal shares between joint authors, which is a default and not a recommendation; custom in the room is often something else entirely. And when the number you agreed on will not divide — three writers, one hundred percent — the arithmetic has its own answer, including who takes the extra hundredth and why it matters that the same person takes it everywhere.

Does it have to be signed to be binding?

A split sheet binds the people who sign it, as an ordinary contract rather than as a special category of document.

There is no such thing as split sheet law. There is contract law, and a split sheet is a contract, which is better news than it sounds: it means the requirements are ordinary and well understood rather than mysterious and industry-specific.

One distinction decides most of what follows, and it is worth carrying even if you read nothing else on the subject. Confirming a share and transferring one are different legal acts. A sheet that records what everyone already owns is confirming. A sheet that moves a share from one person to another is transferring, and section 204(a) requires a transfer of copyright ownership to be in writing and signed. What makes a split sheet enforceable — the signature, the timing, whether an email counts, and the four failures that actually sink one — is a full page and this is the sentence from it you need here.

If what arrived instead of a split sheet is a work-for-hire clause or a producer agreement, you are holding a different instrument answering a different question, and reaching for the wrong one has consequences that show up decades later.

What happens after everyone signs it?

Nothing automatic happens: the shares are entered by the writers themselves at every society that pays, and the sheet stays with the writers.

This is the step that surprises people, because signing feels like the end of the job. Signing it is the covering note.

What actually happens next is three things you do:

• Register the work, at your PRO and at the mechanical register, each of you filing your own share.
• File the same numbers everywhere. The agreement never changes; the boxes do, and one society’s form asks for a different shape of the same fact than the next one’s.
• Keep the copies, all of you, somewhere that is not one person’s laptop.

An agreement that exists only in four people’s memory does not turn into a registration by itself, ever. Every society pays on the filing you made and not on the document you signed, which is the whole reason the two have to say the same thing. And when the money still does not arrive after all of that, a short statement has its own list of usual causes and the splits are only one of them.

What if it never happened, or already went wrong?

Four states, four routes: nobody signed, one person will not sign, the filed numbers are wrong, or the session was years ago.

Find yours, go there, and come back to this page never.

What is different in Canada?

Canada diverges at three steps: who counts as a joint author, what a co-owner may do alone, and what moves a share.

The Canadian answer is not a footnote at the end of the American one. It changes the step you are standing on, which is why it appears here rather than in a paragraph at the bottom.

The divergence that catches people first is the second one. In the United States a co-owner can license the whole song non-exclusively without asking anybody, and in Canada that generally takes every co-owner’s consent. Same song, same four people, one border, and the co-writer who never answers goes from an inconvenience to a veto.

The third has a sentence you can hold. Section 13(4) of the Copyright Act:

no assignment or grant is valid unless it is in writing signed by the owner of the right in respect of which the assignment or grant is made, or by the owner’s duly authorized agent

Read the reach of that rather than the requirement. It covers an assignment and a grant of an interest, which is wider than the American rule it resembles. What that means for a sheet you are about to sign is worked through properly elsewhere, and so is the Canadian test for who is a joint author at all.

What to do before the end of the week

Write the sheet for the song you are working on now, and for the most recent released song that does not have one.

Two documents, ten minutes, a template that asks nothing of you. Then, when you want to know how far the problem actually goes, the checklist finds every song in your catalogue that is missing one and tells you which of them is urgent.

Nothing in this business will ever ask you for a split sheet. No form requires it, no society requests it, no distributor blocks a release without it. You write it because you decided to, or it does not fucking exist.

FAQ

Do you need a split sheet if you wrote the song by yourself?

No. A split sheet allocates shares between writers, and a song with one writer has nothing to allocate. The recording is a separate copyright with its own paperwork, and being the only writer settles nothing about who owns that.

Can you write a split sheet before the song is finished?

You can agree the rule beforehand, and writers often do. The sheet itself names a specific song, so it gets signed once there is a finished song to name on it.

Does one song need more than one split sheet?

No. One split sheet covers one musical work, however many recordings, versions or releases of that work exist. A remix or a live version is a new recording of a song whose writer shares were already settled.

Does everyone on a split sheet have to be registered with a PRO?

No. A writer’s share exists whether or not that writer is affiliated with a performing rights organisation. Affiliation is how each writer gets paid their performance royalties, not a condition of holding a share in the song.

Sources

• US Copyright Office, Copyright in General — that a work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form, and that registration is in general voluntary because copyright exists from the moment the work is created. The two sentences under this whole piece: nothing about who owns the song waits on a document.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 201(a) — that copyright vests initially in the author or authors of the work, and that the authors of a joint work are co-owners of copyright in it. The default a split sheet replaces.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 — the definition of a joint work as one prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole. The test for whether a song has more than one author at all.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 204(a) — that a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed. Why confirming a share and transferring one are different acts with different requirements.
• Copyright Act (Canada), section 13(4) — that no assignment or grant is valid unless in writing signed by the owner of the right or the owner’s duly authorized agent. Broader than its American counterpart, because it reaches grants of an interest and not only assignments.

This is not legal advice. Everything above is US and Canadian law, stated generally, and what your own situation needs turns on facts this page cannot see — what was agreed, where you are, and what paper already exists. This page is a map: every argument it points at is worked through properly on the page that owns it, and none of them is summarised here well enough to rely on. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. Before you sign one of these documents or accept one, have a lawyer in the relevant territory read it.

Keeping the register

Everything above is a sequence rather than an act, and what makes a sequence survivable is knowing which step a given song is on — including which parts went stale when the numbers last moved. CatalogTracker keeps master splits and publishing splits per track, each summing to their own 100, and marks a split for resharing when it has changed since the last time everyone confirmed it, with the newer share superseding the older one rather than sitting beside it. A split that moved and a split that everyone agreed to are not the same thing, and a register that cannot tell them apart is a register that will let you believe the second one. In development for iPhone.