With his new album “Overtime” now out, WordPlay T. Jay is taking this opportunity to show how to get music registered with the copyright office.
To start, head over to www.copyright.gov. New rules have been posted there regarding copyrighting. They include:
1. Published songs cost $45 each for a single author.
2. Unpublished group registration is $65 for 10 songs.
3. Full album copyrighting is $65.
To register a single song, you’ll log in and select to upload a sound recording, ten agree to the terms and conditions.
After that, enter the title of the song, then continue and answer questions like if it has been published, what was the release date, what is the ISRC code, etc., etc.
Once the song info is entered, you have to enter the artist information. Then, there is a place to exclude pre-existing copyrighted material, such as if you used a sample in the song.
Finally, enter information about copyright management and contact information, then pay and submit the MP3 file.
When you upload the MP3, make sure the file name is the name of the song, and with underscores in between any separate words.
For uploading whole albums, the process is largely the same. The only differences come when you enter the “Title of the work being published,” that should be the album title, then you can add another section under “Contents title” to add the song names.
You will also upload all the MP3 files at once, not one at a time.
For more information about copyrighting songs or to see what the process looks like, check out the video below!