Days after Pharrell’s Happy became the biggest download in UK history, knocking Blurred Lines into second place, Robin Thicke found himself playing second fiddle again to his former collaborator. In details from extraordinary court dispositions in the US into the alleged similarities between Blurred Lines and Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up, it was revealed that Pharrell wrote and arranged the whole thing but Thicke took around a 20% cut of the publishing in the song. He kept up the facade for a year during interviews – where he was “high or drunk” – talking about it as a song he co-wrote.
This has been a common practice in the music business for more than a century. More recently known as “change a word, take a third”, it’s endemic, particularly in pop, where the star insists on a publishing credit from struggling songwriters as a negotiating tactic to record their songs.
Simon Napier-Bell’s recent book, the barnstorming Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, is bursting with tales of agents, publishers, DJs and radio station owners systematically taking a cut of songs they were promoting. As Napier-Bell tells it, this became endemic during the music hall and vaudeville days and accelerated in the rock’n’roll era, when Colonel Tom Parker would insist songwriters give both him and Elvis a cut of their songs if Presley recorded them. Parker’s logic was that it was better to have a percentage of a guaranteed hit than own a song outright that no one would hear.
Most acts acquiesced, but not all. Dolly Parton famously refused to share I Will Always Love You with Elvis and the colonel, recording it herself and, years later, making millions from Whitney Houston’s cover.
Even the most famous songwriting partnerships were not always what they appeared. John Lennon and Paul McCartney effectively worked as “editors” on many of each other’s songs in the Beatles, but they were all listed as being by Lennon/McCartney.
When songs are recorded, an instrumental part can dramatically elevate it but the player often doesn’t get a writing credit. Spare a thought, then, for Herbie Flowers (who wrote and played the bass line on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side) or Andy Summers from the Police, who created the guitar riff for Every Breath Take, which remains a Sting composition and earned him – and him alone – millions when Puffy Daddy sampled it on his own I’ll Be Missing You.
Some bands, such as U2 or Coldplay, split everything equally no matter the scale of each member’s contribution and this is arguably why they have stayed together for so long. Not having the singer and guitarist take all the songwriting credits can pay enormous dividends for all concerned as Everybody Hurts, REM’s biggest hit, shows. It was mainly written by Bill Berry. And he was “just” the drummer.
