the unsavory truth about songwriting credit

[tabruns]

Originally Posted by bombaysaffires

Songwriters typically don't give away their bread and butter ($$) for a word or two. It's when someone makes a substantial contribution to the song/meaning/melody whatever.

Frankly I *do* believe our girl could have grabbed the credit-- or people acting or her behalf. The music business is pretty nasty. (Stevie's famous words "We're rock stars, and rock stars aren't nice"). And reading the articles, it talks about record labels, managers, whomever demanding writing credit for their artist so that person appears to be responsible for creating their own material and success … and if Stevie didn't bring enough good stuff to the table for FM, I can totally see her management fearing it would look bad for her to be covering someone else's material on a Mac record. On a solo record is one thing-- there are 10-12 songs on an album and that's a tough order to fill for any writer on every.single.album. So having a couple of songs by other writers there isn't anything "bad". But to only have to cough up 3 songs for FM and not even be able to do that would make her look really bad. Not to say she didn't have all her vault material but obviously she liked Seven Wonders, took it to FM, *they* really liked it and thought it had single potential, and it would just look bad for Stevie to just be the 'singer' on an outside writer's song on a Mac album.

It's a business all about 'image' and not necessarily about truth or honesty or integrity (ask Lindsey, he can talk about that forever). So yeah I can see Stevie's managers saying to Sandy, "think of the money you'll make in royalties even as a cowrite on a FM album". Having that hit with the Mac means she can charge more for her songs if other bands/singers want to do them. It's all tradeoffs.

Hmm. I can see your point here. And I can definitely see Stewart weighing a reduced percentage in favor of bigger on-a-Mac album sales. I wonder why the just "additional words" credit, if Nicks was trying to grab credit, and why Nicks has been so vocal about saying she only got the credit because she couldn't actually remember all the lyrics and just "winged it"? That seems very proactively blunt and honest for someone trying to grab credit.