The Copyright You Already Own

The moment you finish writing a song — even if it exists only as a voice memo on your phone — you own it. No form to fill in, no fee to pay, no certificate to wait for. Copyright in most countries attaches automatically at the point of creation, and most working songwriters either don’t know this or don’t quite believe it.

What they own, specifically, is worth understanding. A song actually contains two distinct copyrights, and confusing them causes real problems down the line.

The first is the composition copyright — the melody and the lyrics as an abstract work. This belongs to whoever wrote them. If you wrote the words and your co-writer wrote the melody, you likely share it, in proportions you should agree on early and in writing. The composition copyright is what generates royalties when someone streams the song, covers it, syncs it to a film, or plays it on the radio.

The second is the sound recording copyright — sometimes called the master. This covers the specific recorded performance you made. It belongs, by default, to whoever made the recording. In practice that’s usually the artist or producer, unless a label funded the session, in which case the contract determines ownership. The master is what generates royalties when that particular recording is streamed or licensed — separate money, separate rights holder, separate negotiation.

Beyoncé and a teenager in a bedroom both hold masters. The teenager’s just hasn’t earned anything yet.

What Copyright Doesn’t Cover

Copyright protects expression, not ideas. You can’t copyright a chord progression. You can’t own a key, a tempo, a song structure, or a genre convention. The I–V–vi–IV progression underpins hundreds of charting songs and belongs to no one. What copyright protects is the specific, original way you’ve expressed something — the particular melodic shape, the exact lyric, the specific arrangement of sounds in your recording.

This is why most plagiarism cases are harder to win than headlines suggest. Proving that someone copied your specific expression — rather than independently arriving at something similar, or drawing from the same shared well of musical tradition — is a high bar. The Blurred Lines verdict rattled the industry precisely because it seemed to lower that bar toward protecting feel and groove rather than specific notes, and it remains controversial among musicologists and lawyers alike.

Titles aren’t copyrightable either. Crazy is a song by Gnarls Barkley, Patsy Cline, Seal, Alanis Morissette, and dozens of others. None of them own the word.

When Registration Actually Matters

If automatic copyright is real, why does anyone bother registering? The answer is enforcement.

In the United States, you cannot sue for copyright infringement in federal court unless your work is registered. More importantly, if you register before infringement occurs — or within three months of publication — you become eligible for statutory damages and attorney’s fees. Without registration, you can only claim actual damages, which are often difficult to prove and rarely worth the legal cost of pursuing.

Registration in the US costs a small fee through the Copyright Office and creates a public, timestamped record of your claim. In the UK and most of Europe, there’s no equivalent registration system, but timestamped evidence still matters — a lawyer will want to establish that you created the work before any alleged infringer. Poor Man’s Copyright, the old trick of mailing yourself a sealed envelope, has no legal standing. What does hold up: metadata in audio files, dated project files, emails, upload history to a DAW or cloud service, and formal registration with a collection society.

Speaking of which: registering your songs with your performing rights organisation — PRS in the UK, ASCAP or BMI in the US, SOCAN in Canada — is not the same as copyright registration, but it’s essential for actually collecting the royalties your copyright generates. Unregistered songs earn royalties that get distributed into a general pool and paid out to whoever is registered. You can own a copyright and still not see a penny because you never told the right organisations it exists.

Copyright lasts a long time — in most territories, the life of the author plus seventy years. The composition and master clocks can run differently depending on when and where the work was made. It’s unglamorous, but understanding the basics means you’re not unknowingly handing something away — to a collaborator, a label, or the public domain — before you’ve had a chance to decide.

The Resonillator Copyright Calculator at /modules/copyright-calculator.html can help you work out the copyright status of a work and what protections apply in your territory.