The is the last five minutes of a session. It is also the most important five minutes.
Picture a co-write on a Tuesday afternoon, two writers, one on melody, one on lyrics, bouncing ideas off each other until the chorus clicks.
At the end of the session one of them packs up and says, "That was great. We'll sort the split stuff whenever."
Any experienced adviser knows what "whenever" means. It means never, or it means court.
That "split stuff" is the publishing split: who owns what percentage of the . In UK law lyrics, melody, and structure all count as songwriting, and there is no rule that one outweighs another, so the split is whatever the writers agree. Because contribution is almost impossible to measure objectively, the industry leans on a simple default when nobody has negotiated otherwise: divide it equally. Two writers, 50/50; three, roughly a third each. Anything else (a contribution-weighted split) is perfectly legitimate, but it is a deliberate negotiation away from that equal starting line, not the norm.