Independent publisher Primary Wave Music has entered a partnership with Mary J. Blige covering both her compositions and her recordings, with financial terms undisclosed. LADIPOE’s new deal goes the other way: his songwriting rights sit with Sony Music Publishing Nigeria while his masters stay at Mavin Records. A catalogue owner who treats those two structures as one kind of transaction will misprice both.
One Counterparty Versus Two
When a partner takes compositions and recordings together, the owner negotiates a single set of terms against a single blended income line. Publishing income and master income arrive from different payers, on different schedules, and are accounted for in different units. Blending them hides which side is carrying the value.
When the pen and the masters sit at different companies, as in LADIPOE’s case, each rights holder reports separately and each deal has its own term, its own split and its own audit rights. The writer ends up with two counterparties, two statements and no automatic cross-check between them. That costs administration time, but it also gives the writer two prices instead of one.
The practical consequence for an independent: if you own both sides, ask any buyer or partner to quote them separately, even if you intend to sign one agreement. A single headline number cannot be tested. Two numbers can.
What an Undisclosed Term Sheet Tells You
Nothing about price. Primary Wave’s financial terms were not published, so there is no advance, no revenue share and no multiple to borrow from that deal. Using a famous partnership as a comparable for your own catalogue means comparing against a number nobody outside the deal can see.
What the announcement does show is scope: compositions and recordings in one arrangement. Scope is the part you can copy into your own negotiation. Before accepting any offer, write down which of these it covers:
- Compositions only, recordings only, or both
- Whether the partner administers, co-owns or acquires outright
- Which income streams are included, and which are carved out
- Who controls enforcement and registration after signing
A partner who will not answer the fourth line in writing has not told you what you are selling.
Lyrics Are a Composition Claim
The fourth item matters more now than it did a year ago. Rightsholders connected to Elvis Presley’s catalog have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging its Claude models were trained on lyrics to 274 songs without authorization or payment. The pleading is built song by song: 274 songs associated with the singer. The unit of the claim is the individual work.
Lyrics are part of the composition, so a claim like this sits with whoever owns or controls the publishing, not with whoever holds the masters. For a catalogue owner, that creates a pricing question that did not appear in older deals: if a publishing partner takes administration or ownership, who decides whether to sue over AI training, who funds it, and who receives any recovery?
Put that in the term sheet before signing. Three clauses cover it:
- Whether enforcement decisions need your consent
- How litigation costs are recouped, and from which income
- How any settlement is split between you and the partner
A catalogue with clean, song-level registration gives a partner or a court a list of works to point to. A catalogue without one gives them a research project.
Unregistered Income Shrinks the Base You Are Selling
Any buyer prices from historical income. Income that never reached you is missing from that base, and some of it never will. Collecting societies CAPASSO and GVL both redirect unregistered income after three years. Money that sits unclaimed past that point does not wait for you; it is reallocated.
This is where a split structure and a combined structure behave differently. In a combined deal, one partner may register everything but you lose the ability to see which side produced the gap. In a split deal, the writer must confirm that the publisher has registered every work, and the masters owner must confirm the same for recordings. Either way, the audit has to happen before the sale, because an unregistered track depresses the income history a buyer capitalises.
A Pre-Deal Worksheet You Can Run This Month
Use this sequence on your own catalogue before accepting any partnership offer:
- Split the trailing income. Take the last full year of statements and separate publishing receipts from master receipts. If your accounting blends them, that is the first fix.
- List works, not releases. Count the songs. The Anthropic claim is framed at 274 songs, and your enforcement position will be framed the same way.
- Check registration against the three-year line. For each work, confirm it is registered with every society that pays you. Flag anything with income older than two years that has not been claimed.
- Request two quotes. Ask for a price on compositions and a price on recordings, then compare their sum to any blended offer.
- Get enforcement rights in writing. Decide in advance whether AI-training claims stay with you or pass to the partner.
If the sum of the two separate quotes exceeds the blended offer, the difference is what you would be giving away for the convenience of one signature. If it does not, the combined deal may be the better one, but you will know that from your own numbers rather than from a partnership whose terms nobody has seen.
