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ROYALTY FREE MUSIC - LICENSING & COPYRIGHT

Premiumbeat.com attorney, Patrick Curley, an entertainment lawyer specialized in the Music Industry reviews the basics of Copyright and Music Licensing.

At Premiumbeat.com, our business is selling licenses to use music in multimedia and traditional media productions.  By providing royalty free music we make this process exceptionally easy for our clients. 

Nonetheless, it’s important to understand what copyright means, how it applies to music, and how clients can obtain the rights to use one of our songs, or any other song for that matter.  Terms such as "royalty-free music", "stock music", and "synchronization licensing", get tossed around loosely, and this adds to the confusion. Hopefully this mini-tutorial will shed some light on this.

A TALE OF TWO COPYRIGHTS: COMPOSITION AND MASTER

Copyright is intellectual property. If you own the copyright to something, it means, quite simply, that you have the right to decide who can make a copy. Copyright is the right to copy. Obviously it's more complex than that but we'll keep it basic for now.

In terms of music, the key thing to understand is that each recording of music actually includes two distinct copyrights:

1. The copyright in the song itself, or the musical composition, or simply the Composition. This means the rights in the words and music of a song, and is often referred to as the 'Publishing' rights. Think of an old-school songwriter sitting at a piano, writing music and lyrics to a song. That song exists before it is recorded. Often musicians (especially in electronic music and hip hop) have a hard time grasping this distinction because they write music while they are producing it - sitting at their computer. Copyright is formed when you write a song, by virtue of the fact that it is new and original and takes a graphic form, such as writing down the lyrics or doing a demo. The copyright in this Composition is owned by whoever wrote it, until they assign or sell those rights to a Music Publishing company.  There is no legal requirement to register a copyright with the copyright office in your country, and registration does not create the copyright, but it does serve as evidence of its creation.  This can be an important tool in copyright infringement cases.

2. The copyright in a sound recording, also known as the Master. The Master is a recording of a Composition, so in a sense the copyright to the Composition is embedded within the Master. The copyright to the Master is owned by whoever produced it. Often this is a record company. To illustrate this, think of a famous song such as "Georgia on my Mind". Each record company that produces a version of that song owns their recording, but the fundamental rights to the composition remain with the original publisher, who owns the Composition - the copyright of the song itself.

Part 1 - A Tale of Two Copyrights: Composition and Master
Part 2 - Music Publishers and Record Labels
Part 3 - Synchronization and Master Use Licenses
Part 4 - Music Licensing Definitions