How to Copyright Music

Video Transcript

"FREDERICK BURCHELL: Hello. My name is Frederick "Ricky B." Burchell with B4 Entertainment on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to talk about producing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your independent CD. Now, let's talk about copyright and contracts. It's so important that if you have anybody do anything on a record it's that you have a contract with them. So many times that I've seen people work on a record together, they recorded songs together and they don't get a contract, and the record ends up selling good and then next thing I know--next thing you know, people are suing the person who put the record out and they make no money on it; they might just have played one bass lick on there, the next thing you know, they suing to get all the profits from the record. So what you want to do if you have anybody doing anything on the record, get a contract with them. Let them know that--let everybody know the understanding that you have with the record--that you may--you own the record or if you're going to give them percentage of the sales, give them the percentage. But they need to know everything up front before you put that record that out. You need to have the contracts with everybody who did anything--background singers, vocalists, anybody who did--played the instruments, anybody who did anything on the record, make sure you have a contract on, and you can look on the web and find contracts or it could just be a basic agreement that they understand that this is a work for hire or they understand that they're just getting a percentage off the record. Also you want to do is copyright your material. Make sure all your material is copyrighted. Now, what you can't is you can record all your songs and send it in all at the same time to save you money, instead of copyrighting one song at a time. You could copyright the whole record at one time, or you could just go to copyright.gov and look under "sound recordings" and make sure you copyright that material."