Learning From The "Uptown Funk" Royalty Split

"Uptown Funk" is one of the biggest selling songs in a long time, proving that people really do like the funk. How big? Just check these figures out.

• 627 million YouTube views
• 5.5 million units in the US alone
• 95,000 album sales

What's interesting is that the songwriting credits were originally split between artist and producer Mark Ronson, the featured Bruno Mars, Phillip Martin Lawrence and Jeffrey Bhasker.

After the song became a hit, many more were added to the list however, most recently Nicholas Williams and producer Devon Gallaspy, the creators of "All Gold Everything". Why? Because there was a sample from the song in "Uptown Funk"  (I don't hear the similarity myself). This was good enough to gain 15% of the huge hit, which amounted to about $400,000 until now.

But there's more. Two months ago the representatives of The Gap Band put in a claim on YouTube that "Funk" was close to their "Oops Upside Your Head" (this one you can hear the similarity in the bass line) and each of the four writers there were give 3.4% of the song as a result.

The moral of the story here is that since the "Blurred Lines" court case, everyone is being a lot more cautious about songwriting credit.

This will probably become a standard form of doing business from now on unfortunately, and will only change if the "Blurred Lines" decision is reversed on appeal. Welcome to the new world of songwriting.

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