This is an idea borrowed from the world of IT code writing. I have been trying to find a collaborator to help me create a stage musical by turning my lyrics into songs. I'm having trouble finding someone for two reasons, I think: 1. It's a big commitment. There are a lot of song lyrics needing melodies and arrangements. 2. It's quite complicated and difficult to co-own a musical and all the songs it contains in the copyright sense. Individual songs can be registered as collaborations at PRS for music but not the play itself. That would need to be registered separately if we were trying to charge performing rights. In fact I'm not interested in looking for performing rights, so I would be quite happy to forget about that and just make my script 'open source'. Put it up on my website complete with all song lyrics and let anyone who wanted to have a go write the music for an individual song which we could then register as a collaboration. Even that might not be worth doing since as far as I can understand the legislation no royalties are payable for the public performance of a song, only if someone were to record it and sell the recording in some way. In fact the financial aspect is just a bore to me, my interest is simply in getting the project completed and finding a company willing to put it on, which will almost certainly be an amateur or student group, and my reward will be in seeing it performed and an audience (hopefully) enjoying it.
I have no experience in this field so I would like to hear people's views on whether or not I could collaborate with a number of people in this way.