Split sheets online — digital split sheets that live with your music

What a split sheet needs to contain

A split sheet that can be acted on — by a PRO, a lawyer, a label, or a court — needs specific information:

The track details. Title, ISRC (if assigned), date of creation, and any other identifiers that make the track unambiguous. "That song we made at the session in March" is not sufficient identification.

The collaborators. Full legal names, PRO affiliation (PRS, ASCAP, BMI, SOCAN etc.), IPI number if registered, and contact details. Using artist names rather than legal names creates complications when royalties are distributed.

The roles. What each collaborator contributed: songwriter, co-writer, producer, recording artist, featured vocalist, lyricist. Roles matter because they determine which type of split (publishing or mechanical) applies to each person.

Publishing splits. The percentage of the composition each collaborator owns, totalling 100%. Even if only one person wrote the song, this needs to be stated explicitly.

Mechanical splits. The percentage of the sound recording each collaborator owns, totalling 100%. These may be different percentages to the publishing splits for the same people.

Signatures and dates. The agreement is only as good as the evidence that all parties accepted it. Signatures with dates — ideally with a verifiable record of when they were made — are what make a split sheet enforceable.

The problem with paper and PDF split sheets

The traditional split sheet is a Word document or PDF that gets emailed around, signed (or sometimes not signed), and then filed somewhere — usually an email folder or a hard drive — completely disconnected from the music it refers to.

This creates several practical problems:

The document and the music are separated. Years later, when a sync opportunity arrives or a dispute arises, someone needs to find the split sheet for a specific track. It might be in an email from 2022, in a Dropbox folder that no longer has the same structure, or on a hard drive that is no longer operational.

Version confusion. The split sheet was discussed over email, revised twice, and the final version might be the one attached to an email from a specific date — or it might be an earlier draft. Without a clear version record, the "final" split sheet is ambiguous.

Missing signatures. The document was sent, someone forgot to sign it, the email got lost, the collaboration moved on. Many split sheets in circulation have one party's signature but not another's. An unsigned split sheet is a statement of intent, not an agreement.

No connection to royalty systems. A paper split sheet does not automatically inform your PRO, your distributor, or your Finance tracking. The information has to be manually re-entered at each registration step.

Digital split sheets — what they do differently

A digital split sheet built into a music management platform solves each of these problems:

Lives with the music. The split documentation is stored inside the same project as the track files. When you access a track, the split sheet is there. When the track is shared with a label or sync supervisor, the ownership information is accessible in the same place.

Version control. The proposal workflow means there is a clear record of what was proposed, what was revised, and what was finally accepted. There is no ambiguity about which version is the agreed one — it is the one all parties accepted.

Digital acceptance with audit trail. All collaborators accept or reject the proposal digitally, with timestamps. The acceptance record is not a signature on a document — it is a logged action with a date, time, and user identity. This is a stronger evidentiary record than a handwritten signature on a document whose date of signing cannot be independently verified.

Integration with downstream systems. Split information agreed in the platform flows into Finance for royalty attribution and connects to Contracts for formal legal documentation.

How digital split sheets work in TYFRA Vault

Who needs a split sheet

Every collaborative track. If more than one person contributed to the creation of a piece of music, there should be a split sheet. This applies to official co-writing sessions, beats made available for artists to write over, remixes, features, and session performances where the session player has a royalty interest.

Solo artists who use external production. If you license a beat from a producer and write vocal melodies and lyrics over it, the publishing split (what you wrote — likely 100% to you) and the mechanical split (the recording, which includes the producer's beat) are different. Both need documenting.

Labels signing artists. A label's interest in an artist's recordings — the mechanical split the label holds — should be documented from the first release, not reconstructed retroactively when the relationship changes.

Publishers signing songwriters. A publishing deal assigns the songwriter's publishing interest to the publisher in exchange for advances and services. The split sheet documents what the songwriter is assigning.

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