In this episode of the Inspiration 2021 series, Wendy Day delivers a practical, step‑by‑step guide for independent musicians on establishing a solid legal and business foundation before they achieve success. She explains why contracts are essential for featured artists, label clearances, investors, and leased beats, and stresses the need for written agreements early on. She then walks through incorporating a business (using Corporate.com as an example), obtaining an EIN from the IRS, and opening a corporate bank account to keep personal and business assets separate and protect personal property from lawsuits. Next, she discusses trademarking an artist’s name, noting cost ranges ($1,000‑$2,000), when it’s critical (common or generic names) and when it can be delayed (unique names), and cites real‑world cases like Common and Biggie who had to change their names. Finally, she advises copyrighting songs—prioritising singles first due to cost—and points viewers to copyright.gov for details, while acknowledging that full catalog registration often waits until revenue streams are established. The video concludes with promotion of the series and links to her YouTube channel.
Chapters
Hi guys, welcome back. So welcome to Inspiration 2021, where we want to talk about things that can inspire you as well as help your career. So this series is going to cover not only, um, how-to things, like things that you need to accomplish in order to better your career, but also some mental and, um, personal inspirational type things that you're going to need to succeed in the music business. So I'm trying to be a little more well-rounded in 2021. Today we're going to talk about contracts, incorporation, and trademark, and the difference between doing this seriously and doing this half-assed is having your foundation set so that as success comes, you're not chasing paperwork and things that you should have done prior to your success coming. There's, um, there's a method to all this, and you want to make sure that you dot your i's and cross your t's now so that you don't have to do it later. And that's not a financial thing. I'm not saying that you, you put things off until later because you don't have the funding to do it and you should do it all now. I'm saying there's certain things that you really should take care of in the very beginning so that you can get to the next level quickly. So, um, contracts are something that you absolutely need to have if you have any side artist on your song. You need an agreement from that artist. If they're signed to a record label, you need a clearance from that label in order to utilize that artist on your music. Additionally, if you have an investor, you should have some sort of an agreement between you and that person as to how the money gets split up when it starts coming in, how much they're going to invest, what they get in return. And for every beat that you purchase and/or lease— and I hate leased beats, we'll get into that in a bit as to why, that's another topic for another day— but you need to have a licensing agreement between you and the producer allowing you to use that beat, okay? So, um, the first thing I want you guys to do is to incorporate your company, and I use a site called Corporate incorp.com. They charge, I think, $99 above whatever the state filing fee is in order to incorporate you in your state. Their, their turnaround is very quick. I never buy the extra stuff that they offer. I just do the incorporation there. They make the money off of the other stuff, so I hate to, like, I hate to cripple their ability to make money, but they sell a lot of stuff that you don't need. So incorporate your company. Um, for example, my company Artist Centric is Artist Centric LLC, and I incorporated it in the state of Georgia through Corporate.com. I think it cost me $175 to do it, and I want to say it took a week. It was very, very quick. I then went on to the IRS.gov site. I got an employee identification number, and I did it live, so I got it immediately and received the, um, the letter from them with my new tax ID number as a PDF. I was able to take that and the, um, Articles of Incorporation to my bank to open a corporate bank account. And the reason that you do that is you want to keep your personal money separate from your corporation. And I do that because if something goes horribly wrong and I get sued, I don't want to get sued personally. I would prefer my corporation to get sued. So I do everything in the corporate name. That way somebody can't, um, take my house or my car if they go sue happy and sue the shit out of me. Then, um, trademark. Definitely trademark your name, and that's especially the case if you've got a name that is a word that is very popular. For example, when we trademarked Trouble's name, I thought it was gonna be really hard because his name is Trouble and it's a very basic word. There's an artist in North Carolina called Knowledge, and if he were using his government name, I would suggest he trademark it immediately because I'm guessing there's probably a bunch of other Knowledge artists out there that have the to trademark. So you have to trademark your name, even if it's your name, like Wendy Day, right? I had to trademark Wendy Day so that somebody else couldn't use it in music. Um, if your name is a little bit more, uh, difficult, you can probably wait on this. And the only reason I'm saying that is because it's going to cost you more than likely somewhere between $1,000 to $2,000 to trademark your name. So if you've got a very obscure name— and of course nothing is coming to mind me right now like Ishkabibble, um, not, not knowing why you'd ever want to use that name. But if your name is something that's a little bit more, um, unique— I don't want to say difficult, I want to say unique— you can wait to trademark. But just understand that if you start using a name and someone else disputes it, you could end up spending a lot of money and then having to change your name, so you'd be wasting a lot of branding, marketing, and promotional dollars. So this is kind of helping you to make sure you can use the name that you're about to promote and market so that you don't waste a lot of money. And just in case you think it cannot happen to you, um, I look at the artist Common back in the '90s, you know, his name was Common Sense, and there was a reggae group I think called Common Sense, and he actually had to change his name. Biggie was the same. He had to change his name to Notorious B.I.G. because somebody was already using the name Biggie Smalls. So it's not, it's not something that never happens, and it's something you certainly want to avoid and something you want to offset before you start spending money on your career. And then the last thing I'm gonna say is, to copyright your songs before you put them out. And this is one that even with my clients, it's kind of a last— it's a last step because it can be very costly to— especially if you're dropping a lot of music, it can be very costly to copyright your music. So we tend to copyright singles immediately, and then when the money starts coming back into the company, that's when we copyright all of the other songs. So You can go to copyright.gov to find more information. I don't want to waste a lot of time here. I've done a ton of videos on how to trademark, how to copyright, so I'm going to send you to do some proper research so that you can figure that out. I just want to use this opportunity to tell you that it's something you need to do. So thanks for tuning in. This is Inspiration 2021. It's going to appear on Instagram TV the day that it drops, and then the next day I'm going to move them all to, um, to YouTube. So you can go to youtube.com/thisiswendyday to see all of my videos that I've done in the past. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you.
