Are Song credits connected to royalties

#1

Hello,
I have a question about song credits. If I add other people besides me into the song credits. Are there automatically royalties held back (for example by the bmi),
or are royalties and song credits independent from each other?

Another question I have is: how does the order of credits work? I always thought the songwriter that wrote the most is on the top and so on.
But when I submitted my credits to Spotify (via Distrokid) they came out the other way around.

Could someone help me with this, I would really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

#2

So there’s royalties for songwriters and royalties for the musicians on the song.
BMI or ASCAP handles JUST the songwriters. If your band has four members and you split say playing a show, releasing a record, selling t-shirts, 4-ways then that is a royalty that is collected by Distrokid.

I too was a little baffled when a songwriter I collaborated with only wrote a few lyrics and I wrote all of the music and most of the lyrics, yet they put his name first. Did you ever find out anything about that?

Very little action on these forums I noticed…

#3

Hey Tripp thank you for answering.
Sadly I wasn’t able to find anything out yet. I just have the suspicion that credits are listed alphabetically on Spotify. However I believe tidal does list them in the order you submit the credits in.

#4

if it’s alphabetically it would be by FIRST name then (which is even weirder) not really too big a deal but … as a songwriter (and I’m sure you know) it takes a lot of work and creative mastery to write a good song. I think a lot of people don’t give enough credit to the one’s who are truly creating the songs.

#5

Yes I noticed it would be by first name. I find that odd too. And I totally agree, the actual writers get way to little credit.