Mark Darlington is a music publisher and producer
Music publisher and producer Mark Darlington has raised concerns about what he describes as unfair treatment of producers in the music industry, especially when artistes sell their music catalogues.
In an interview on Hitz FM on July 9, 2025, he stated that some top artistes are removing producer credits and claiming full ownership of songs before selling their catalogues, which he says is wrong and unfair.
“I’ve had quite a few calls from some of our top producers where some of the big stars are selling their catalogue and what’s happening is the splits that have been agreed between them and the producers that was maybe the songs were online, on the DSPs etc all of a sudden, the producers have gone on there. Their credits are gone and 100% ownership to the artists which is wrong,” he said.
Mark Darlington explained that when a producer works on a song, they are entitled to more than just publishing and mechanical royalties.
They also have rights to the master recording unless they have officially sold those rights.
“When a producer works on a song with the artist apart from the mechanical and publishing splits that they agree on, they have a share of the master rights as well unless the producers have sold and relinquished their rights to either the record label or the artiste.
If that has not happened, they have producer points on the exploitation of the master recording, so sometimes some of the artists who think they have paid the producer unless it’s written specifically in the contract that they relinquish their rights they still have a say in the master rights in terms of a producer point. It varies depending on whether it’s a record label that commissioned them to work on the song or an independent artist and the percentages are different depending on what agreement or the popularity or influence of the producer etc,” he stated.
He added that many producers, especially those who are not popularly known, are now realising that their names and rights have been removed from songs they worked on, just because the artiste has sold the catalogue.
“There are a lot of disgruntled producers now major producers that you might know whose credits have been taken because the artists have sold their catalogues and removed their sort of rights on the song. For example, if I’m a producer and I have my 50 per cent publishing mechanical rights to a song because maybe the catalogue being sold, they are selling including the publishing or whatever, I being the artiste have changed and said I own everything 100 per cent and sold that off which I think is wrong. Producers struggle as it is at the moment especially because they did not know much about some of this music right.
He added, “A lot of them were, I should say were cheated because due to ignorance and some of them have gone back to try and correct some of these wrongs. It’s been quite a struggle for a lot of the producers because some of these artistes have become quite huge and for some of producers when they were starting up they were sending beats to artistes and artistes were using them because the producers wanted to gain some momentum and get that sort of acknowledgement that producers they send these beats and they’ve used them some of them were not even paid a penny and to take away their rights of the songs as well it’s an injustice that we need to talk about as an industry.”
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