If you are a songwriter with a publishing agreement, you need to inform your publisher that your new song contains a sample and that a certain percentage is shared with original rightsholders. We recommend sharing the ”cost” of the sample equally – that the % due to original rightsholders comes off the top.

Example: you have obtained a license for a 15s sample of a Category C track. This means you will share 10% of the total 100% publishing pie with the original publisher(s) and songwriter(s), and 90% goes to you and your publisher.

Let’s say that you have a 30% / 70% publishing agreement with your publisher, meaning that your publisher gets 30% and you get 70% of the publishing split. This means that for this song that contains a sample, you get 63% as a songwriter, your publisher gets 27% and original rightsholders get 10%.