Tips for Musicians: Learn How to Copyright Your Music I should start with a disclaimer that this article talks about the general knowledge information on copywriting music and is not legal advice. Whether you are going through or are considering copyrighting your content, it is advisable you talk to a lawyer or just Google the specific copyright laws in your state first.
We live in a highly commercialized world today, where sharks and vultures are at every corner waiting. When you put your efforts into creating something beautiful, you have to protect it by copyrighting it, a process which simply proves when you submitted your original work. The process of copyrighting your music may seem complicated and unnecessary at first but trust me you need to know how it works.
How copyright works There are people at the copyright office who receive your submission but they don’t listen to it. In fact, their work is basically to receive your work and file it somewhere, in storage, for when you need to prove it’s your work. When you copyright your songs, art or music, whatever you call it, you are protecting your creations by putting an immortal stamp and the date of creation is acknowledged by the system.
But you need to know that there are some aspects of your submissions that you cannot be protected, even if copyright is registered to you like a. These are:
The overall concept or the idea of the song
Chord progressions
Title and short phrases
Mixtape cover, itunes or album artwork concept.
Simply put, when you copyright your music you copyright your lyrics and melodies. When you look at it, these are essentially the only things you can create, right?
Steps in Copyrighting your Music
Step 1: Start by making a good quality copy of your music and store it in a CD, computer hard disk, online (cloud storage), mini-disk, LP, MP3 or whatever form you want. Just make sure you have an actual copy that you need to create a hard copy of your music. When your music is recorded, it is ready to be copyrighted. Let’s get it registered.
Step 2: Before we proceed, I should point out that there are two ways that you can choose to register your music, and both start online at the Government’s Copyright website www.copyright.gov On your browser, go to the website and click on the ‘Register a Copyright’ link. Registering your content online is simple, but note that it takes time to be processed.
Step 3: There are essentially three forms you will have to complete when copyrighting your music but the ones that matter in this case are the Performing Arts (PA) and the Sound Recording (SR) forms. Which form you complete just depends on what you are copyrighting? Here is a brief guide to help you know which form to fill.