• Do I Need To Copyright My Music Before Distribution?

    It's not a must to copyright your music before you distribute it. If you want to take the risk and you don't feel like copyrighting is in your budget, go ahead and do so. You do have proof of upload when you publish your work on social media, streaming sites, and even when you communicate in emails. I understand people who feel like this is enough to get by. 

    But I strongly recommend copyrighting your music as a creator, especially if you have really good content. I like to copyright my own work in bundles to save money on the process. This is referred to as multiple works claims and you can get more info on that type of claim here on the Copyright.gov site. 

    How Can I Copyright My Music?

    Copyright.gov has a claim registration portal that you can easily sign up to and use. You will be registering a claim to the ownership of your work. The sign-up is easy, but the site itself is dated as hell and hard to navigate. Don’t be overwhelmed like I was.
    You will first need to determine if you want to do the standard claim or the cheaper solo author claim. If you are like me and fully own the music and lyrics to some or all of your songs, you can save money by doing a solo author claim for $45. If not, you will likely be paying $20 more.
    If you’re copyrighting just lyrics or musical creation, you will want to use the Work of Performance option when choosing your claim type.
    If you're copyrighting the musical creation, the lyrics, and the recording, you will need to use the Sound Recording option when you choose the claim type.
    Having the ownership of a sound recording may be confusing, but if you were for example recorded by a production studio in a play, or recorded by an official label, you would not be able to copyright a sound recording. On the flip side, if you've recorded in your home studio, that recording is all yours.

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