Splits that don't add up to 100%: the error that freezes your money

Nobody loses money over a misspelled title. They lose it over a number. And it is almost always the same number: a split that does not balance, declared with the best intentions in the world.

🧩 What a split is, in one line

It is the agreement on who owns what share of a song, in percentages. If you wrote half and someone else wrote the other half, the split is 50/50. That agreement is what societies use to decide where each dollar goes.

🔴 Going over 100%: the overclaim

This happens more than you would think. Each party declares separately what they believe is theirs, and the total comes to 110, 120 or 155. The society cannot know who is right, so it does the prudent thing: it flags the work as in conflict and holds payment until the parties agree.

The worst part is not the wait. It is that often nobody realises it is held: the artist simply sees that this song "earns nothing" and assumes it is not being played.

🟡 Falling short: money with no owner

If the split adds up to 85%, the missing 15% does not vanish: it stays unclaimed. And unclaimed money has a known destination — it piles up undistributed, and recovering it later is far harder than declaring it properly in the first place.

It usually comes from honest oversights: the person who sang the hook and nobody wrote down, the friend who changed a line in the studio, the producer who also co-wrote but was only counted as a producer.

⚖️ Two splits, not one

This is the conceptual mistake that costs the most money. A song has two separate rights and each carries its own split:

1. The composition — the written song: lyrics and melody. It belongs to whoever wrote it.

2. The recording (the master) — that specific recorded version. Its owner depends on what was signed: the artist, a label, whoever produced or paid for it, or several at once.

They can match, but they do not have to. A producer might own 20% of the master and 0% of the composition. A writer who never sang might own 50% of the composition and 0% of the master. Collapsing both into a single number is the fastest way for someone to end up claiming what is not theirs — with no bad faith, just confusion.

🔍 The five most common mismatches

• The "feat." nobody wrote down. The guest artist contributed lyrics and is not in the composition split.
• The producer's points. Agreed verbally, everyone remembers a different number, and nobody wrote it down the day it was agreed.
• Same person, two names. They appear under their artist name in one place and their legal name in another, and the system counts them twice.
• Splitting "what's left". Someone writes 33/33/33 and 1% floats free. It looks like nothing; it is a mismatch.
• Declaring a publisher that controls nothing. Someone lists a publisher out of habit and that share goes into dispute.

🛠️ How to fix it before you register

1. Write the split down the same day. Studio memory lasts less than you think. What is not written gets argued about.
2. Run the two counts separately — composition and master — and check each one lands on exactly 100%.
3. Have every person confirm it in writing. An unsigned split is not proof to anyone.
4. Standardise names. Decide which name each person uses and use it identically on every song.
5. Check it before registering, not after. Fixing a work already in conflict is far slower than getting it right the first time.

Solnota checks it in a second, free and with no account: type the shares and it tells you whether it balances, whether someone is overclaiming, or whether a share is left with no owner. And if you need the signed document, it generates that too — with a signing link for each participant, and nobody has to create an account.