One of the most rewarding and stimulating aspects of a career in music can be the process of collaborating with other musicians. If you’re part of a band, you’ll know the rush you can get from bouncing ideas around with your band-mates, nutting out the perfect lyric together or coming up with a killer riff during rehearsal. Even if you’re a solo artist you’ll at some stage spend time working with other musicians, lyricists or composers. But while collaborating with other people can be rewarding, it can also have many inherent pitfalls. Consider the following scenario.

Sick of slogging it out on the pub circuit, you and your best friend decide to get together and write songs for other bands to play. Because you’re a singer, it’s decided that you’ll write the lyrics for the songs and your friend, a guitarist, will come up with the music. You start composing and, before you know it, your venture is a success. Bands are clamouring for your songs and the money is rolling in! Suddenly, the problems start.

Your friend, who spends hours sweating over the composition of the music, points out that it takes half as much time to produce the lyrics; therefore he deserves a bigger share of the profits. You disagree, saying that it’s the quality of the material that counts, not the time it takes to produce. If John Lennon had spent a measly thirty seconds scribbling the words to Imagine on a dirty napkin would they be any less a work of genius?

Another problem arises when a political party approaches you about using one of your songs for their latest campaign. You’re eager to accept because the exposure would be great, plus the organisation is offering a huge amount of money to use the material – way more than you would usually receive. Your friend is totally against the idea. A long-time supporter of an opposing party, he refuses to have his work associated with such a group. The money isn’t an issue to him and he won’t be swayed.

The final hurdle comes when you find out you’re being sued for infringement of copyright. Turns out the melody to one of your most successful songs is almost identical to that of an obscure song released in the seventies by a little-known artist. Your friend flat out denies deliberately copying the tune, but the owner of the song sues anyway. In the ensuing court case your friend is found guilty of breaching copyright, and the court awards all copyright in the song, and therefore all earnings from it, to the original artist. You both lose your good reputations, all the money you earned from the song and are forced to sell your houses and personal possessions to pay off the claims. The partnership, and friendship, dissolves in bitterness and resentment.

Jeez! Not a cheery scenario, is it? But disputes between collaborators happen all too often in the industry. Fortunately, most of these problems could have been easily resolved if the friends had done a little planning BEFORE embarking on their partnership. What they should have done was work out a comprehensive, written agreement defining the obligations, duties and expectations of each person involved in the partnership – after all, it’s amazing how time and money can cloud a person’s memory of an event. When drafting such an agreement, they should have also included even the most obvious issues, such as a 50/50 split of earnings, in order to prevent such things from being disputed later.

In this lesson we’ll look at some of the concerns that can crop up when creating material with other people. We’ll discuss how to avoid conflicts like the ones above and give you a few tips for enjoying successful partnerships with other musicians and creators.  With a bit of forward planning, you can ensure that your collaborative efforts are both financially and artistically rewarding. And who knows, with the right partner, you could be the next songwriting force to rival Rogers and Hammerstein or Elton John and Bernie Taupin.