Name ownership
Because it is the only clause where the default is catastrophic. With nothing written, the name usually belongs to whoever registered something first, which means seven years of four people’s work can leave with one of them.
Pro edition
Band Agreement.
The public page publishes five answers. This is the document they came from — every clause, what it is for, and the two places where copying somebody else's answer is actively dangerous. Not legal advice: a checklist of what to decide, which is the part a lawyer cannot do for you and the part that costs nothing.
10 clauses
| Clause | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Parties and start date | Who this covers and from when. Sounds trivial; decides whether a song written in month two is inside the agreement. |
| Songwriting splits | Publishing. The single largest long-tail income in most bands and the one most often left implicit. |
| Master ownership | The recordings, separately from the songs. These are two different rights and conflating them is the most common mistake. |
| Income and expenses | What comes out before the split, who authorises spending, and the ceiling above which everybody has to agree. |
| Name ownership | Who can use it, and what happens when the line-up changes. The clause that decides whether a break-up has one band or two. |
| Departure | Notice, what a leaver keeps, what they stop earning, and whether their credits remain. |
| New members | Whether somebody joins on equal terms immediately, after a period, or as an employee. All three are legitimate; leaving it unstated is not. |
| Decisions and deadlock | The voting rule and what happens at a tie. Most agreements skip the tie and most disputes are ties. |
| Dissolution | What happens to the masters, the name and the bank account if everybody stops. Easier to write when nobody wants to. |
| Amendment | How the agreement itself changes. Unanimous is the usual answer and it is worth writing down that it is. |
The 3 that decide whether a break-up is survivable
Departure
Because it is the clause that gets written during the argument it was meant to prevent. Agreeing what a leaver keeps while everybody still likes each other takes twenty minutes; agreeing it afterwards takes lawyers.
Deadlock
Because a four-piece ties constantly and a rule that only covers majorities covers about half of real decisions. "It waits" is a legitimate answer and so is "the person whose song it is decides" — having neither is not.
The conversation, before the document
- Have it early, and not at a gig Before there is money, before there is a record, and sitting down rather than in a van at 2am. The absence of stakes is exactly what makes the conversation possible.
- Write the answers before the document Five sentences in a shared note. The legal wording is the cheap part; agreeing what you actually mean is the work.
- Name the uncomfortable case out loud "If you left next year, what would you expect to keep?" Everyone has an answer and most bands have never heard each other’s.
- Get one lawyer to read it, once An hour of somebody’s time on a document you have already agreed. Far cheaper than an hour on a dispute, and a different job.
- Re-read it when the line-up changes A new member changes the arithmetic of every clause in it. This is the moment it is most often forgotten and most needed.
2 things not to copy
Copying another band’s splits
Equal splits work in bands where the writing is genuinely collective and cause quiet resentment in bands where it is not. The right answer depends on facts about your band that no template knows.
Copying a break-up clause from a bigger band
Agreements written for acts with advances and a label assume structures you do not have. A four-person clause borrowed from a twelve-party deal is not conservative, it is wrong.
6 ways a band ends badly
- No agreement at all, and a name owned by whoever registered the domain in 2019.
- Songs and recordings treated as one right, discovered when a sync request arrives.
- A leaver who assumed they kept earning, and a band that assumed they did not.
- A voting rule with no tie-break, in a band with an even number of people.
- Expenses authorised by whoever has the card, until the year one of them buys an amp.
- An agreement written for the original three and never updated for the fourth.
Nothing here is legal advice and none of it is jurisdiction-specific. Rights in songs and in recordings work differently country to country, and a band agreement should be read by somebody whose job that is before it is signed.