If you make new music and want to protect your intellectual property, then it might seem a difficult task, especially if you’ve already made your music freely available via social media sites, streaming platforms or by self-publishing. In the professional world of music making, publishers will tend to take the necessary steps to prevent unauthorized entities from using the music they have a right to. However, if you’re doing this for your own music, you probably won’t have recourse to the legal teams that many of the big publishing firms have. That said, you can still take steps to ensure your music is properly protected. Here’s how.
Self-Publish on Your Own Website
If you publish your music in a digital format on someone else’s platform or site, then you’re going to lose a degree of control. Yes, sometimes copyright infringement issues are dealt with by the likes of YouTube and Spotify, but these measures don’t always protect the ‘little people’. Even if you want to make your music widely available on sites like SoundCloud, it is best to publish digital versions of your music on your own website first. If you do this, then there’s no argument to be had down the line as to who owns the rights. Your site had the music first, after all. The first thing is to own your own website with a unique domain. Finding suitable band or artist domain names is easy with the right checker and something that takes minutes. Register your chosen domain and the digital receipt for so doing will be an indelible marker as to when the intellectual property rights to the site were first asserted. After that, you can self-publish music and lyrics in audio or written format to prove you own them.
Agree Your Split Before You Publish
When self-publishing, make sure everyone knows where they stand. If you’ve worked with a producer, then come to an agreement with them over how much of the intellectual property they own. Co-writing credits should also be acknowledged and split according to an agreed percentage. Of course, these steps aren’t needed if you write and produce your own work, but it is an essential step for most bands so they don’t get into needless disputes over copyright down the line.
Monitor Usage
You’ll never be able to track down someone using a song of yours in a video or for an advert on the other side of the world. This doesn’t mean you cannot monitor for unauthorized usage, however. Digital services such as TuneSat will monitor for music you’ve published being used in any other format globally. Such services won’t necessarily capture every unauthorized use but they’re getting better at helping to protect creatives everywhere, so they are certainly worth looking into.
Conclusion
Protecting music in the digital age is much more than simply asserting rights with a copyright symbol. You also have to take some proactive measures before publishing and afterwards. That said, protecting your intellectual property doesn’t take a lot of effort or know-how in the music industry, so there’s nothing to hold you back.
