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Producers Are Struggling to Get Paid — Even Some Who Work With Travis Scott

Four producers and songwriters who worked on Travis Scott's Utopia are struggling to get paid.

While Travis Scottperformed a three-song medley at the Grammys earlier this month, the teams of some of the producers and songwriters who helped make his hit album Utopia were fuming — they didn’t yet have the signed paperwork that would get them paid for their work on the project. The Utopia contributors who spoke to Billboard about their experience would almost certainly dispute that they are “relatively unknown.” But as Anastasiou noted, the collaborative nature of much contemporary pop music does mean that there are mountains of paperwork and negotiations for an artist’s team to complete around each album release. “I don’t know any attorney’s office that represents producers and songwriters that’s not completely underwater at the moment, scrambling to get all the deals done,” adds Dan Petel, founder of This Is Noise MGMT, another writer-producer management company.

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