Intellectual Property: Creative Commons and Crowd-Sourced Lyrics

[EddyCurr]

What is the state of things with respect to crowd-sourced lyric collaborations?

I suspect that collaborations on lyric development are far from a novel concept at this point. This post is an appeal for input from those with knowledge and experience.

Besides the ins/outs, wheres/hows and whos/whys, I am interested in the aspect of attribution to collaborators as well as how lyric projects are kept "on theme" in what I assume could be the free-for-all of a crowd-sourcing environment.

Is Creative Commons licensing for lyrics a thing? If so, does CC licensing work? Is it necessary for lyric collaborations to take place under the umbrella a CC-sanctioned environment? Or can a lyrical outline be registered w/ CC and then, say, be posted in this sub-forum of AGF for whomever wishes to take part to join in, w/ the CC registration being periodically updated to reflect each additional contributor ?

[kurth]

...so are you suffering a writers block and you're fishing for free ideas?

[EddyCurr]

Does kurth's response reflect the official view of P&W towards my post ?

Or does someone else here have another take on it ...

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by EddyCurr

What is the state of things with respect to crowd-sourced lyric collaborations?

What do you mean by "state"? Put your lyrics out there, give folks permission to use them, off you go. If you are going to collect input from others, you need a platform to enable that, and hopefully that platform can help you keep track of attribution. I'm not sure how you would retain that attribution outside of some kind of print/electronic form; in live performance it would be a bit cumbersome.

AFAIK there aren't any platforms specifically for songwriting/lyrics, but I suppose anything that supports collaborative writing would do. Open source projects often have leaders/moderators who keep things on track and oversee changes. IMO, a CC song lyric project would be no different from any other CC or open source project.

I think it's something that doesn't exist now because most songwriters have pretty personal visions, and songs are so short that a bunch of crowd sourcing would quickly get unwieldy. You'd end up with a triple-length "Alice's Restaurant" pretty quickly.

[kurth]

Originally Posted by EddyCurr

Does kurth's response reflect the official view of P&W towards my post ?

Or does someone else here have another take on it ...

Eddy...the concept you have of 'crowd sourced song lyrics' is an oxymoron. A song, like any creation, must start and end with a personal vision. Imagine crowd sourcing a painting. A film, contrarily, could be crowd-sourced...because of the difficulty of execution and the resources required.Although, even there an artistic director, for example like francis ford coppola who just self-financed his newest 150million film, would prefer to maintain control .

But we can play.....I've got 1000's of pages.

here we go.....

SHE'S GOT 4 EYES AND AN APARTMENT IN BROOKLYN
SHE SPEWS MOUNTAINS OF LIES LIKE A VOLCANO ERUPTION

YOUR TURN....BUT WHO GETS TO WRITE THE CHORUS ??

[EddyCurr]

In this context, "Crowd-sourced" was chosen reflect collaborators outside of my local cohort. While there are many interesting and talented people in this cohort - not one of 'em performs music, much less has any inclination or desire for writing lyrics.

We can agree on the premise that the creation of a song STARTS with a personal vision. However, we'll have to agree to disagree that song composition ends the same way because there are endless examples of outside influences contributing to the subsequent development of a vision as it passes through a series of iterations.

(In fact, I've changed my mind. Even the idea that every song STARTS w/ an all-encompassing vision that remains unaltered is open to examination.)

In the absence of a muse and/or a local circle, the idea of seeking out like-minded musically inclined imaginary acquaintances occurred to me. A bit of background research suggested that I wasn't the first person to think of this. The thread was created to seek input from others here about certain aspects of how such collaboration works.

Hasn't gone quite as expected.

Time to consider it Asked & Answered.

[Coler]

It’s a legal question with a legal answer. I can only give you the position in Ireland, which is that co-writers acquire equal shares in a song. That applies even if one writes 90% and the other 10%, unless there is an explicit agreement to the contrary.

It also applies no matter how many of them there are. It can also apply where one person’s ideas don’t make their way into the finished song. Once you agree to take part in a collaboration with others, the result is owned in equal shares regardless.

So the question here would be, is there any explicit agreement (ideally recorded in writing) to dislodge the general rule? I suspect the Irish position is consistent with Europe and the UK as there is probably an EU source for this (and UK may not have undone it post-Brexit if so but I don’t know).

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not legal advice.

[SongwriterFan]

The way it's typically handled in Nashville is that all the writers involved in the song (no matter how much or little they contributed) share equally in the song. Also known as "a word for a third" (which obviously assumes there are three songwriters involved).

I've heard it's a lot different in Los Angeles. Somehow they attempt to "keep score" to determine how much each person has contributed and use that to divvy up the royalties. Which, to me, doesn't make a lot of sense because it leads to people wanting THEIR words to be the ones used, rather than the RIGHT words for the song (no matter who came up with them).

But clearly, both systems work.

[Coler]

Originally Posted by SongwriterFan

I've heard it's a lot different in Los Angeles. Somehow they attempt to "keep score" to determine how much each person has contributed and use that to divvy up the royalties. Which, to me, doesn't make a lot of sense because it leads to people wanting THEIR words to be the ones used, rather than the RIGHT words for the song (no matter who came up with them).

...

That also fails to acknowledge the dynamic nature of collaboration - I come up with this, you suggest that, which inspires one of us to come up with something really good. That good thing was hit upon by one person but generated by two, and the muse.