From 'Young Gifted and Black - The Story of Trojan Records'
A constant problem for the administration of Trojan was the matter of
artists' royalty payments. David Betteridge on payment and royalties:
'The interesting thing about the ownership of a lot of the material
from the late '50s and certainly the '60s and early '70s is, in many
cases, people just don't know who owns them. Because it really wasn't 
catalogues; it was somebody who just came along that had some tracks
of songs - it might be a retailer in Jamaica - who would do some
Productions on the side.
 'Apart from Duke Reid and Coxson Dodd, there were about 20-30 people,
perhaps ten of which were regular, and the difficulty is the way in
which a lot of those deals were done. I mean, we've all 
heard the famous stories about a T- shirt and bottle of coke for
payment for material.
Well, that's not dissimilar to what happened, because there were
certainly times I can remember in the early days where proof of
contract was the returned cheque, signed by the person who cashed it.
'A lot of the time there wasn't royalties; it was an outright
purchase, which is of course absolutely unknown today, really. There
was no copyrighting ownership, who owned what, in Jamaica for many
years, so it wasn't ratified. There wasn't a contract, we didn't have
renewals, options. You bought the music not off the artist but 
straight from the producer.' 
With the company paying the Jamaican producer for the recording, the
onus Was on him to pay the singer - that is, if the performance hadn't
been bought for a flat one-off fee. Another means of forming a deal
with an artist would be to mail out a contract along with cheque made
out to the performer, and if the cheque was cashed then the contract 
would be deemed in force.' 
In an interview between Dave Barker and Rob Randall in the 15 January
1972 edition of the NME, where Barker is complaining of being paid
only £1,000 for his contribution to the smash hit 'Double Barrel', Lee
Gopthal is quoted as saying: 'In fact, Barker and Collins 
aren't legally entitled to any share at all of the proceeds of the
record's sales.. . You see, Ansel Collins had sold the backing tapes
to Winston Riley the producer outright and Dave Barker was simply
brought in as a session singer and paid a straight session fee. 
'This is one of those deals, common in the record business, when the
producer takes the gamble of laying out cash on an untried product.
If, as is the frequent case, the disc fails to sell enough to cover
production costs, the producer bears the loss and doesn't 
ask the artists or technicians to return their fees. So if, on the
other hand, the  gamble pays off and the record makes a lot of money,
those same artists and technicians can hardly reasonably expect a
share of the profits. In this case, Riley has given the boys £1 ,000
each out of the goodness of his heart.'