For collaborating songwriters, artists and producers, splitting up contributions to a song can be tedious and downright confusing — often leading to thorny disputes. A new app called SPLITS® aims to eliminate those hassles from the get-go, helping creators get paid in the process.

In the free app, collaborators can generate and sign a split agreement — the document that clarifies individual contributions to a track for publishers — straight from their phones. Create Music Group co-founder Alexandre Williams says he came up with the idea after experiencing first-hand the headaches that can come along with negotiating those agreements.

“In the three years that we’ve been working with songwriters and artists, we’ve had to deal with thousands of tracks where the songwriting credits were either incomplete or where there were disputes, which ultimately resulted in less royalties for everyone involved,” he explains. “We’re introducing SPLITS to the creative community as an easy, non-confrontational way for creatives to agree upon songwriting contributions at the time of creation, all with just a few clicks right from the screen they spend the most time on everyday — their phones.”

 

To create a new agreement through the app, users simply add collaborators and set a contribution percentage for each, upon which SPLITS will automatically send a notice to each collaborator, along with a snippet of the song. From there, collaborators can either click “agree” or make adjustments.

Once everyone’s on board, the official splits agreement is sent to the collaborators’ publishers.

Read more on Billboard.com