Agree the splits in the room.
A song split is the percentage of a composition each writer owns. It takes ten minutes to agree on the day and can take years to fix afterwards. This is how splits work, how to decide them without the conversation turning awkward, and what to write down before anyone leaves.
What a split actually divides.
Splits apply to the composition, the melody and the lyrics, not to the recording. Those are two separate properties with two separate ownership conversations, and mixing them up is where most confusion starts. Agreeing that you own half the song is not the same as agreeing that you own half the master.
The composition split is what gets registered with a society and what determines who receives performing and mechanical royalties for the rest of the song's life. It follows the work everywhere the work goes: every stream, every broadcast, every cover version, every placement.
Within that composition share, a distinction worth knowing is between the writer's share and the publisher's share. If you have a publishing deal, part of the composition income is allocated to the publisher for the work of administering and exploiting the song, and the rest stays with you as the writer. The writer's share belongs to the person who wrote it, and the split conversation with your co-writers is about the whole composition before any of that.
How writers usually decide.
There is no legally correct formula. There are conventions, and the only wrong answer is leaving it undecided.
Everyone who was in the session writing gets the same percentage, regardless of who happened to land the hook. Simple, fast, and it survives friendship better than most alternatives.
The traditional division: the melody and music side takes one half, the words take the other, split among the contributors to each. Common on songs with a clear separation of roles.
Weighted to reflect who did what, which is fairer in principle and harder in practice because everyone privately values their own contribution generously.
A producer who wrote the chords, the topline or the core musical idea has an authorship claim. A producer who engineered and arranged an existing song may not. Decide which happened, explicitly, rather than by default.
Why the conversation gets postponed.
Nobody avoids the splits conversation because they are dishonest. They avoid it because the session went well, everyone is happy, the song might never come out anyway, and raising percentages feels like turning a creative afternoon into a negotiation.
The problem is what changes between then and later. On the day, nobody knows whether the song is worth anything and everybody remembers what happened. Two years later, the song has a placement, memories have diverged, one writer has a manager, another has a different recollection of who wrote the hook, and the conversation is now about money that already exists.
A disputed work does not pay the person who is right. It pays nobody, on hold, while the claim is resolved, including the co-writers who were never part of the disagreement. That is the actual cost of postponing, and it lands on the whole room.
What to write down.
A split sheet does not need to be a contract drafted by a lawyer. It needs to be unambiguous, dated and agreed by everyone whose name is on it. A message thread where all writers confirm the same numbers is worth more than a perfect document nobody signed.
The working title, the session date, and any alternate title it might be released under later, so the sheet can still be matched to the release it becomes.
Legal names alongside artist names, plus each writer's society membership and publisher if they have one. This is the information a registration will need later.
Stated as whole numbers where possible, and actually adding up. A sheet totalling 110 percent is not a rounding issue, it is a dispute waiting for a payment run.
Signatures, or at minimum every writer confirming the same numbers in writing in a thread that includes them all. One person's note of what was agreed is not agreement.
Fixing a split you never agreed.
If you are reading this about a song from three years ago, the move is not to register a claim unilaterally and hope. That creates the dispute rather than resolving it, and it freezes the income for everyone including you.
Start by reconstructing the evidence while it still exists: session files with dates, project folders, messages from around the writing, anyone else who was in the room. Then go to your co-writers with a proposal rather than a demand, and aim for a number everyone will sign today rather than the number you believe you deserve.
A settled split at a percentage slightly below what you wanted starts paying immediately. A perfect claim in dispute pays nothing for years. That trade is almost always worth taking, and it is the advice we give our own writers.