Founding Jane’s Addiction members Perry Farrell and Eric Avery discussed publishing and royalty money in a recent Billboard interview.
Perry Farrell said, “I remember speaking with my lawyer, Owen Sloan, who was supposedly the best lawyer to do this. He had been getting people huge deals, and he got us a huge deal. We were talking about publishing, and he said, ‘Do you know how the splits work?’ ‘No I don’t.’ He showed me how the splits generally work, and how you change the split anyway you want. Different bands do it differently. Some bands — you’d be surprised — their members get no publishing.
After learning about this, I said in my mind, ‘Well, okay, I’m writing lyrics, melody, and music, but I don’t want to be one of those bands where the other guys get no publishing.’ Some of the members do write songs, contribute to the songs. And the other members are great, so I want everybody to have some as well, even if they didn’t write anything. But then it gets very funny, because the idea of them not writing anything, that’s not real. Let’s just say I wrote all of a song. Once I get into rehearsal, they’re writing, they’re being creative, so they should get some too.
So that’s how I factored the songs. I said, ‘By the way, if anybody wants to write an entire song, we’ll sit down and we’ll all listen to it. If we all decide it’s great, we’ll record that one.’ I was not telling anybody they couldn’t write songs, but this was my band.
Eric Avery said, “To be fair, I could see how he wanted more than an equal split, certainly. And where we wound up was, we gave him twice as much as any other member, and then we split what was left amongst the rest of us. That was consistent with Perry always going forward to this day. When it comes to money and stuff like that, he’s pretty aggressively self-interested.
I remember famously Dave played one of our shows after that and put on a t-shirt that said “12%” or something, because that was the amount that was going to be left for him in Perry’s system. So it left some resentment, for sure.”
