Copyrights | Wendy Day Speaks About Protecting Your Music

Hey, hey everybody! So today we're going to talk about copyrights, a boring topic but an important topic. Um, a copyright is a registration that you file with the Copyright Office, that proves ownership of your song, the lyrics and the music. I wrote an article on my blog at industryreport.com about copyrights. I put the link below, so if you click on it, in case you miss anything that I'm saying here, you can go in and read the article. There's links in the article to the Copyright Office. You know, I do these videos because I really want you guys to understand and learn the music industry, but I really don't expect you to get a full understanding of everything in a 6-minute video. So it would be extremely awesome, and a smart boo would go and do more research after watching these. Don't take what I'm saying as gospel. Go and do the research yourself. You may find something different or in addition to what I'm saying, so I definitely encourage you guys to go do the research. Um, the Copyright Office is at copyright.gov, C-O-P-Y-R-I-G-H-T dot gov. Um, that is the website for the Copyright Office, and what you do is you upload them or send by CD if you're old school, um, a copy of your song. And there's a fee for that. You pay, you pay for that. You pay $55 to upload a song, or if you're going to do it old school and mail it in, you're going to pay $85 to do it. So I suggest you upload. Um, that copyright registration is the proof that you own your song. Now, you technically own the song as soon as you make it. You own the publishing to the song as soon as you write it, as soon as you put pen to paper, or as soon as you— if you type it into your phone or an iPad, however you write your song, technically as soon as you write it, you own the publishing. What a copyright is, it's the proof of ownership and it goes on file with the date that you register it. It's the proof that you need if someone else comes along and steals your hook, or they steal a verse, or they just rip your whole song. Or one day you're listening to the radio and you hear a song that has your beat to it, and it's not your song, it's somebody else's. The copyright is the proof that you own that song. When I was coming up in the music industry— dinosaurs roamed the earth— when I was coming up in the music industry, there was a thing called a poor man's copyright. And a lot of artists, because they don't have a lot of funding, had this thing that they would do called the poor man's copyright. And they would take an envelope, they they would address it to themselves. They would put their music inside, the CDs and the lyrics, you know, typed out lyrics, into the envelope, and they would seal it. And then they would sign their name across the seal of the envelope, which proves that the envelope hasn't been opened when it's received, right? And they would mail it to themselves. And they would do this because in their mind, the postmark would prove the date of the song. And it makes perfectly logical sense. It was extremely inexpensive to do because it was the price of a stamp. And while it did prove the date that the song was written, if someone steals your song and uses it and you need to sue them because they've stolen your song, the poor man's copyright proves that it's your song, but it doesn't allow you the legal right to sue for damages. And if somebody is stealing your song, you absolutely want to sue for damages, right? So the thing about filing copyrights, even though it's $55, um, a song, or $85 if you're old school, is that if you go to court, you will be so incredibly happy that you spent that $55 to to register your song because now you can sue somebody for stealing your song and you can sue them for damages and maybe even pain and suffering. So it's, it's a great idea to copyright your song. Um, again, all of the information is below. The website that you go to, the address, um, it's in a blog post, so you're gonna have to click on something in order to get all the address and the download information, but it is there for you. Or you can not be lazy and go to copyright.gov and find it on your own. Okay, so I called the Copyright Office because I wanted to know if you have 20 songs, let's say, could you then copyright them all together so that you'd be spending $55 for one body of work instead of $55 for a song? And here's what they told me. And again, this is in the blog post below. The guy that I spoke with said that absolutely you could do that. They prefer if you do the songs individually, obviously because they're making money, but they prefer if you do the songs individually because it's just more accurate for them. It gives the name of the song, it lists the writers, but if you have a body of work that's all the same, meaning you wrote the lyrics and you produced it, so you made the beats and, and the song, so that they can all be copyrighted the same, they're all similar, right? Then you can copyright them all together. Again, if you have a song where you are the rapper and you have one producer that did all of the beats on all of the songs, you can absolutely copyright them altogether. This is not the preferred way to do it, but this is the way to do it if you don't have a lot of money and you're a new artist. My suggestion would be if— and I'm going to explain how to do it in a second— my suggestion would be if you are putting out music and making money with that music, that you individually copyright those songs. If you are recording songs and you're not quite sure which ones you're gonna use commercially yet, which ones you're gonna put out, I would suggest that you bundle them together and copyright them so that at least they're protected. And the way that you do that, and again, it has to be the same artist and the same producer on all of the songs that you're copywriting. So if you've got 10 songs with one producer and 5 songs with another producer, then you're going to need to do 2 bulk copyrights. You're going to need to do all of 10 that have the, the, the same writer and the same producer, and then the 5 that have the same writer and that different producer, right? So anything that you copyright has to have the same writer and the producer all along, okay? So what you're going to do is you're going to copyright it as one body of work. So let's just say that I'm copywriting my music, right? And I'm not an artist, you would not want to hear me rap. But let's say I'm copywriting one body of work. I've got 5 songs and the producer on it, let's say Metro Boomin, produced the Wendy Day album. So I'm gonna copyright these, all 5 of these songs, because I'm poor, right, on as one body, and I'm gonna call it Wendy Day 1. And then in my records, I'm going to keep the name of each song in order so that I know exactly what is on Wendy Day One. And then I'm going to upload this body of work to the Copyright Office. I'm going to pay my $55. I'm going to copyright it as Wendy Day and Metro Boomin, and I'm going to copyright it with his government name, right? I'm not going to copyright it just as Metro Boomin. I'm going to use his government name, AKA Metro Boomin. And when the copyright form is returned to me— and it takes about 6 months for them to get you back the paperwork, the proof that you have copyrighted your music. It's copyrighted the minute you upload it and the minute they receive it, but it takes a while for that paperwork to come back to you. But when that paperwork does come back, I'm gonna staple to it my information of what songs are on that upload. If I'm doing it old school, I'm gonna record the 5 songs on CD, I'm going to get an $85 money order, and I'm going to physically mail my CD which says, you know, Wendy Day One with the listing of the songs. I'm gonna mail that to the Copyright Office. I'm gonna keep a copy of of what those 5 songs are on there. And then I'm probably gonna mail it either by FedEx or Express Mail, you know, one of the overnight services. Not because I want to waste $20 sending it Express Mail, but because I want the proof of delivery. I want to keep the receipt. So I'm going to keep the receipt, the list of the songs, and I'm going to, um, keep the copyright paper when it's sent back to me 6 months from now, or even 8 months from now, I'm going to keep all that together. I'm going to staple it all together, and I'm going to keep it in a file somewhere. In fact, to be honest with you, because I'm a little bit anal retentive, I'm going to scan the copyright when it comes back in. I'm going to scan the list of songs, and I'm going to scan the receipt proving that it was delivered to the Copyright Office, and I'm going to keep a copy of that on my hard drive and a copy of that on my separate hard drive. So that I know that I've got the original and I've got two different copies, one in the cloud and one on my laptop. So that's what I would do. Again, all of the information that you need is below here. Just click on the article and take a look at it, take a read. It's, it's a little bit more in-depth than I can go in a 6 to 8 minute video, which is 11 minutes now because I've droned on. But I suggest that you copyright your material. Certainly anything that you're releasing commercially, you definitely want to copyright. Um, anything that you're putting out on a mixtape, you want to copyright that. Again, I realize that you guys don't necessarily have $550 to register for an album that has 10 songs on it, so do it as a body of work. Call it by the album title instead of the singles, but just make sure that you keep really clear records so so that if somebody does steal a song, you don't have to go through and listen to all of your music to find out which body of work it's copyrighted on. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in. I appreciate you all. Have a great day, and I'm posting these every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Take care. Peace.