When a song gets sampled and resold, publishing rights fracture across multiple owners. Rod Temperton's catalog shows the problem: Warner Chappell owns 85%, but 4% of his music vanished into untraceable hands, and even his widow doesn't know who holds it.
Chapters
You know, the other thing that's happening is fractionalized publishing where you can have one song written by one writer, but you can have 4 publishers. And I'm dealing with that with the Rod Temperton song where Warner Chappell used to have 100%. Now they have 87.5%. No, they have 85%. And the other 15%, we know, you know, part of it's with Anthem, part of it's with Universal, and we can't find 4%. And we're like, what happened to it? We're like, can you reach out to Mr. Temperton's widow. Well, she doesn't know who sold off that 4% because people have the rights to sell stuff. Once you sell it, if you sell something to someone else, they can do whatever the hell they want with it.