Topliner Deals: Getting Paid When You Only Wrote the Melody

A topliner writes the melody and lyrics over an existing instrumental. It's the dominant writing model in pop, hip-hop and dance, it is unambiguously songwriting, and it produces more unpaid writers than any other arrangement in music.

The reason is structural: the topliner usually isn't the one who registers the song, controls the files, or talks to the distributor. You did the work and someone else does the paperwork.

The standard split

50/50 between track and topline is the most common starting point — the producer's instrumental as one half of the composition, the melody and lyric as the other. If two people wrote the topline, they divide their 50% between them.

It's a convention, not a law. Variations you'll meet:

• Multiple toplines on one track. The topline half divides among the writers who made the final version. Writers whose ideas didn't survive to the master generally don't hold a share, which is worth saying out loud early.

• Track built around your melody. If the producer scored to your existing topline, the balance should tip your way.

• Sample-based track. The sampled work's owners may take a large chunk of the composition, and everyone else divides what's left. Confirm this before you write, or you're splitting a much smaller pie than you think.

Work-for-hire toplines: know what you're signing

Some sessions — particularly for artist projects and label camps — engage topliners as work-for-hire: a fee, no ongoing writer share. That can be a fair deal at a good fee, and it is legitimate.

What isn't fair is discovering it after the fact. Ask before the session: is this a split or a fee? If it's a fee, is it buying the recording only, or the composition too? A topliner who assigns the composition has sold their songwriting; one who assigns only their vocal performance keeps the writer share.

Note also that a writer's share and a *performer's* share are different things. If your demo vocal ends up on the master, you may have both a writing claim and a performance claim, and in some territories the performance side is a separate registration entirely.

Get on the registration, or you're not a writer

This is the one that costs money. Your split can be perfectly agreed and you can still receive nothing, because the person who registers the work with the PRO controls what gets filed. If they file 100% to themselves — through malice, or far more often through carelessness — your share does not exist as far as the society is concerned.

Protect it with three things:

• A signed split sheet naming you, your PRO, your IPI and your percentage.

• Your own registration of the work with your society. Register your share yourself rather than trusting someone else to do it. Mismatches surface as disputes, which is unpleasant but vastly better than silence.

• The ISRC and release date, so you can confirm what actually came out matches what you agreed.

Ask for the thing that's easy to give

Producers are rarely hostile about splits; they're disorganised. The ask that almost always works is small and immediate: "Can you send me your IPI and confirm 50/50 so I can register my half?" It's a two-line reply, it doesn't require them to do any work, and it creates a written record of the agreement.

Keep your half on record

Musavise's catalogue tool stores every song you've contributed to with your split, the other writers' PROs and IPIs, and flags anything that doesn't total 100% — so a topline you wrote two years ago isn't a thing you have to reconstruct from old messages when a placement finally happens.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.